Thursday, July 13, 2006

And Don't Get Me Started on 'Forward Slash'

In "Lapsing Into a Comma," I mocked my neighborhood coffee bar for using the unnecessary retronym "country muffin" to distinguish a muffin from an English muffin. After all, I pointed out, referring to an English muffin as a muffin would be like referring to table tennis as "tennis."

The sad thing, half a decade later, is that hearing table tennis referred to as tennis would no longer surprise me:

  • I've heard people say "custard" when they mean the form of ice cream known as frozen custard. Custard is a very real and extant substance that still needs a name of its own, people. Do you refer to ice cream as "cream"?

  • I heard a radio host introduce a coach from "the Olympics -- the Special Olympics!" The second part was presented as an amplifier, not a correction.

    On a lighter retronym note, I recently caught the "Simpsons" episode in which Kent Brockman refers to "sky stars" to distinguish the luminous celestial objects from the likes of "Matthew Modine and Charlene Tilton."

    Hey, let's have a contest! If stars need to be called sky stars, what modifier do we need to insert before "custard" to make it clear we mean custard? And how about "the [blank] Olympics"?

  • 19 comments:

    Leonard said...

    The Not-So-Differently-Abled Olympics

    Slightly Jiggly Custard

    Mr Squid said...

    "classic" custard

    noneemac said...

    legacy custard

    the International World Olympics(R)

    noneemac said...

    Uh, can I add one more?

    Custard 1.0

    unclewilly said...

    Old-Timey No Brain Freeze Custard

    The Illegally Doped-Up Olympics

    Bill said...

    "Getting some cookie dough" is more like "getting some chocolate" -- yeah, in context, that makes sense. It's a flavor. But custard is custard. Even simply freezing it doesn't make it that kind of frozen custard. If I say "I'm getting some cream!" at Baskin-Robbins, that doesn't make cream = ice cream.

    Joe Clark said...

    You know you’re talking about backformation, right? And that “forward slash” became necessary to differentiate it from “backslash”? (For some people, at least. And some others cannot dictate an URL without mistaking slash for backslash.)

    Bill said...

    Back-formation is a different thing, though I guess you could call the process related. I understand that backslashes exist, but people who mean "backslash" say "backslash," just as people who say "table tennis" say "table tennis" -- a mention of "slash" should not prompt the question "You mean backslash?" If we're dealing with people who think URLs ever take backslashes, we need to start at a whole different stage of hand-holding anyway.

    Leonard said...

    The Extra Special Olympics

    Forward Slash Custard

    Does this mean that the former guitarist for Guns and Roses is now known as Forward Slash?

    Bill said...

    Good stuff. The Special -- no, really, we're not using it euphemistically here -- Olympics!

    Bill said...

    OK, fine: Webster's New World does list one meaning of "custard" as "short for frozen custard."

    Bah!

    Clare said...

    My parents have a milk languauge barrier problem:

    Full cream milk is called 'Fat Milk' by my mother (milk with lots of fat in it) and 'Thin Milk' by my father (milk for thin people)

    Skimmed milk (don't know what you call it in the States -- I mean milk with all the cream taken out) is called 'Thin Milk' by my mother (milk for people trying to become thin) and 'Fat Milk' by my father (milk for fat people).

    Bill said...

    "Skim milk" used to be the standard stateside term, but the industry has gone to "fat-free milk" of late.

    I love "fat milk," though of course we do have the term "whole milk."

    Supermarkets and such often used to write of their "homo milk" to distinguish it from chocolate milk. I bet the fogies who hmmph about "gay" once meaning "happy" aren't bemoaning that loss.

    Bill said...

    "Two-parent family" is a wonderful retronym example. Another great one I came across on a list of them: George H.W. Bush!

    With gasoline, "regular" is the opposite of "premium" (or, way back when, "ethyl"). I still hear "unleaded" a lot even though there is no "leaded" -- it's in the standard boilerplate of the price-reporting people.

    J. Carryll Thomas said...

    Actually, backslashes work just as well as "forward" slashes do when you're typing URLs. Whether you're visiting http://theslot.blogspot.com/ or http:\\theslot.blogspot.com\, you'll get to the same place.

    Bill said...

    Thanks, "woman"; that is news to me -- I hadn't thought to try. Still: While it's nice of the browser makers to auto-correct the error (and note that the backslashes do get changed to slashes when a page loads), it is indeed an error to use the word "backslash" in spelling out a Web address.

    Unknown said...

    Windows and DOS file paths (like C:\WINDOWS\directory) always require forward slashes, though. And yes, I've seen text that had backslashes instead.

    Retronyms and backformations really aren't that similar. Backformations involve reanalyzing a word and then breaking off a supposed morpheme (like taking burglar and creating burgle from it on analogy of words farmer and farm).

    Unknown said...

    Argh. That should be the other way around, of course.

    Bill said...

    "Natural breasts"!