Retronym alert!

I guess it's not brand new, since I see about 6,000 hits for it on Google, but this New York Times headline showed me a term I'd never noticed before:

Picture Tube TV's Try a Slimmer Strategy
Thursday, January 20, 2005
The New York Times

Standard picture-tube TV's, the kind that the vast majority of Americans still buy, have long been video non grata at the Consumer Electronics Show. Seen as yesterday's technology, they have been relegated to the back room of the show, the industry's biggest gadget festival, where flat-panel liquid-crystal-display and plasma sets take center stage.

"Picture-tube TV" is probably the world's newest retronym. A retronym is a multi-word phrase you need to invent when an old word gets run over by new technologies or products. For example, when electric guitars came along, we had to invent the phrase "acoustic guitar". Plain old "guitar" no longer said it all. Other examples:

• Rotary (or dial) telephone
• Full-service gas station
• Classic Coke
• Plain text
• Manual tupewriter

We've been talking about the new kinds of TV's for quite some time, and so there are nearly 7 million Google hits for "LCD TV" and 375,000 for "flat-panel TV"."TV" all by itself gets 342 million hits. With those numbers for comparison, it's clear that "Picture-tube TV" really is a new arrival. By the time you look, the 6,000 might be up to 7,000.

Remember, you saw it here first.

Steve

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