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Metaphors That Outlive Their Origins
By Jacob Cohen | October 31, 2007
It sometimes happens. We create a metaphor to make something easier to understand, only to find that the new idea replaces the old, and as the old technology fades from use, the metaphor becomes almost unhooked from its original meaning.
Take, for example, the “carriage return” and “line feed” characters that are found in many computer character sets. These come from operations that were performed on a typewriter, and are often used within text files to indicate when the text should start on the next line (differences in convention between different operating systems has caused headaches for people to move text files between PCs running Windows, MacOS, and other operating systems).
Do most people even think of a typewriter anymore when they work with a computer? People no longer need to know or care what a carriage return or a line feed even is. The programming language Visual Basic has a keyword used to represent the character you use to get to the next line. Would the keyword vbCrLf mean anything unless you knew that a carriage return and line feed are how you get to the next line of a file?
There are plenty of other examples to be found, such as referring to a phone being “off the hook” (or to “hang up” a phone), or the “rewind” feature of audio and video players that use media other than tapes. We learn to accept the meanings of these words and phrases based on how we use them, but we lose the origin of the meaning.
Topics: General |
