What's a Retronym?

Ruminating in his Washington Post column about the potential political “firsts” in the 2008 campaign, Eugene Robinson noted that “we’ve come far enough to seriously consider electing the first U.S. president who can be described without using the adjectives ‘white’ and ‘male.’ Who has the better chance of breaking through, Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama?”

He concluded by zeroing in on the cliché most often used by the chattering class in reviewing the media adulation of both: “I hereby pledge never to liken either one to a political ‘rock star’ unless he or she is actually holding an electric guitar.”

I started to circle rock star as the hot bit of jargon used by pundits to describe charismatic candidates, but then the old-fashioned phrase electric guitar caught my eye. The adjective is fading out; guitars powered by electricity are commonplace and are simply called guitars, while their predecessor instruments require linguistic amplification as acoustic guitars. The same cultural shift happened in baseball: few fans say night game any more, because most games are played at night, and it’s the former time of play that needs a modifier, which gave rise to the phrase day game.

That newly necessary modification of an old noun is called a retronym. It was defined in the fourth edition of the unabridged American Heritage Dictionary as “a word or phrase created because an existing term that was once used alone needs to be distinguished from a term referring to a new development.” An example was in the wristwatch trade: when digital watches that flash the numbers came along, the old-fashioned watch, with hands pointing to numbers or marks on the face, became an analog watch. The example given in the Encarta dictionary is snail mail, “coined by those for whom mail is likely to mean e-mail.”

Along comes Merriam-Webster, the company founded by Noah himself (the lexicographer, not the patriarch), with its breezily scholarly Web site, www.m-w.com. Last month, its “word of the day” was retronym, more apt than Time’s narcissistic person of the year. Presumably, this means that the term it defines as “consisting of a noun and a modifier which [sic] specifies the original meaning of the noun” will appear in the next edition of its Collegiate dictionary. The example chosen by M-W is console television set, a deeply bulky device receding into the mists of media history in this age of LCD and plasma screens.

The Merriam lexies, always strong on etymology, cite the earliest usage they can find of retronym in this column in 1980, which credited Frank Mankiewicz, then president of National Public Radio, as the coiner. He was especially intrigued by the usage hardcover book, which was originally a plain book until softcover books came along, which were originally called paperback and now have spawned a version the size of a hardcover but with a soft cover trade-named with the retronym trade paperback. I’m glad Frank is getting mintage recognition on his word to illuminate social and fashion change because his father, Herman, never got the fame he deserved for co-writing the screenplay of “Citizen Kane.”

Last year, Frank — in charge of neologisms at the p.r. firm Hill & Knowlton — alerted me to the skirt suit. In the glass-ceiling era, a female executive used to be required to wear a suit, which was a jacket and matching skirt. Then came the substitution of slacks (trousers that men called pants) for the skirt, producing the pants suit of the last generation or so. Now we are seeing the retronym skirt suit, a combination jacket and matching skirt, to differentiate it from the disappearing pants suit, likely to make a comeback under another name not yet vouchsafed to me.

“In intercollegiate sports,” Mankiewicz told me recently, “we now hear a gifted young athlete called a true freshman. What used to be a freshman is now clouded by young men who have been ‘redshirted’ for a year, thus preserving four years of eligibility by technically remaining freshmen.”

Remember the telephone with a dial? (It replaced the horn-and-clicker device into which Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee shouted, “Hello-Central!”) Along came the push-button phone, quickly re-named the touch-tone phone, requiring the coinage today of the retronym rotary phone. Now even that retronym has a retronym: with the ubiquitous cellphone, everything from touch-tones to rotary dials to two tin cans connected by a taut string are referred to as land lines.

When nobody answers the cellphone, you can leave a message on what used to be called voice mail, faster than e-mail and infinitely faster than the aforementioned retronymic snail mail or postal mail. However, the unmodified noun message, by virtue of its unspoken method of communication, has forced the creation of the retronym text message, often blasted out by those long scorned as “textual deviates.”

Am I milking this subject beyond its intrinsic worth? That reminds me: my refrigerator is stocked with nonfat milk (what happened to skim?) 2 percent milk, calcium-enriched milk, lactose-free milk, chocolate milk (just a half-pint for the middle of the night), soy milk and half-and-half, all of which has caused the creation of the retronym whole milk.

Those fogies that S. J. Perelman wrote were “afflicted with total recall” will remember what they used to call water. With the rising tide of bottled water, not to mention sparkling water (formerly soda water, or seltzer), New Yorkers who yearn for the pristine product of the local reservoirs have taken to asking the waiter for Bloomberg water, formerly Giuliani water, after the sitting mayor’s name. In the rest of the nation, that refreshing and pleasantly inexpensive drink, not carbonated but with its own beaded bubbles winking at the brim, is now known by the retronym tap water.