Opinion

What do token booth, cc, podcast and subtweet have in common?

I’ve never really been one to subscribe to the Oscar Wilde school of thought, in “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” that “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” But I wonder whether dear Oscar might, these days, extend his distaste for enforced anonymity to include subtweets.

Now, a subtweet, if you’re unfamiliar with the term even at this late date, is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a usually mocking or critical tweet that alludes to another Twitter user without including a link to the user’s account and often without directly mentioning the user’s name.”

The coinage dates to 2009, when Twitter was still Twitter, and posts there were referred to as tweets. But if Twitter has been X’d out and tweets are no longer tweets but posts instead, what is to become of the useful coinage “subtweet”?

Given that the word now has become a generic term used on other social-media platforms (hello, my friends at Bluesky), I suspect that “subtweet” will join the ranks of what are known as anachronyms: words that are used “in an anachronistic way, by referring to something in a way that is appropriate only for a former or later time.”

That’s the way Wikipedia defines them, which will have to suffice for now, because the word is too new to have worked its way into dictionaries. Maybe when it does arrive, lexicographers will have identified its originator; linguist Ben Zimmer is often credited online, but he says he doubts he was the coiner.

The term may be as unattributable as it is abstruse, but anachronyms themselves abound:

Residents of New York City still speak of subway token booths, though it has been two decades since anyone saw a subway token except perhaps at the bottom of a jar of change (or loose coins, also now rolling toward heirloom status).

We cc people in emails, though carbon copies — made on a typewriter by inserting a carbon-coated sheet between two blank pages — are as dead as doornails and dodos and the IBM Selectric.

We listen to podcasts, though who even owns an iPod anymore? (Um, I do. Sometimes I like to listen to music when I take a walk, leaving my phone and its tempting distractions at home.)

Some of us, though our numbers are dwindling, still refer to “rolling down” car windows, “dialing” phone numbers and then “hanging up” when the call is over (on those rare occasions when two human beings actually speak on a phone). We say we’re “taping” a TV show on a DVR when no videotape is involved — then again, in the age of streaming, DVRs are following VCRs into oblivion.

“The past is never dead,” William Faulkner once observed. “It’s not even past.” How can we know that for sure? Consider the skeuomorph. That delightfully oddball coinage, dating to the late 19th century, is what the Oxford dictionary folks call “an object or a feature that copies the design of a similar object made from another material but does not usually have the practical purpose that the original does.”

Even as I type these words into a Microsoft Word document, a skeuomorph hovers nearby. Up in the left corner, there’s a sort of square jobbie, adorned with a little rectangle at the top and a slightly littler one at the bottom. Everyone knows that clicking on it will save what has been written, but only users of a certain vintage will recall the image as a representation of a quaint storage device that has gone the way of the steamer trunk.

It was called the floppy disk. The originals, in the 1970s, were made of Mylar and thus bendable, later replaced by harder, more rigid versions. But everyone still called them floppy.