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Idly watching my middle son the other day, I noticed he was having trouble twisting the big plastic screw out of his new play workbench. "Counterclockwise," I instructed. Brian, who is three, gave me his Dad-is-speaking-Japanese-again look. "Counterclockwise," I repeated. Then it dawned on me. This is the boy who, watching TV clips from when I was his age, asked me: "Was the world black and white back then?" Time, with all its analog analogies (stroke of midnight, bandits at 12 o’clock, a quarter past four, and so on) has stood still for me, but not for him. He simply has never seen the rotation of clock hands, clockwise or otherwise. He is a child of the Digital Age. Being a word person, I was saddened. Time to notify Funk and Wagnalls: We’ve lost another one. Might as well take "counterclockwise" out of the dictionary, or at least demote it to archaic-usage status. Perhaps more appropriately: Hit the DEL key to send the word into oblivion. Oh, sure, someday Brian will understand the meaning of counterclockwise, as I understand the gist of, say, burning the midnight oil. But I wonder: In the face of all the neologisms—dot-coms and not-coms, e-commerce and the e-conomy—what is to become of those thousands of wonderful old terms like "ticker tape" and "disk jockey"? Will these concepts go the way of the cubit and the rumble seat? Words are wearing out quickly these days, as others come along to take their place. David Barnhart, the lexicographer, has said that English used to add about 1,000 words a year. With the rapid advances in technology, that number has jumped to 10,000 to 15,000. The dictionary may soon have to double in size as we put "e-" in front of every word or drop it into old phrases to produce new variations. (You might say that the existential question for word lovers these days is, "To e or not to e?") Even words that stick around are often forced to take on new forms, generally as retronyms. Now, that may be an unfamiliar term. I remember Sister Victor in grade school teaching homonyms, antonyms, synonyms, acronyms. Retronyms, I don’t remember. But they’re all over the place these days. The thought is that you have a word. A perfectly good word. One that has been around for more than a thousand years. Say, clock. A clock tells time. Hands move. Parents scream at kids until they learn to count by fives so they can tell time. No one is late for the train. Then someone invents a new kind of clock. Let’s call it a digital clock. Fine, but now when your nosy neighbor asks if you have a digital clock in your kitchen, you say, "No, I have a...." Then what? Ahh, so we invent a term. You have an "analog clock." That technology creates retronyms isn’t exactly new. For years now, we’ve had broadcast television and acoustic guitars. Technology isn’t even the sole source of retronyms—major-league baseball now has position players (as opposed to designated hitters). But technology has put the retronym trend on steroids (which I gather have replaced Popeye’s can of spinach). Because we now have so many different ways of interacting, we wind up talking of face-to-face meetings and voice-to-voice conversations—even, sometimes, image-to-image meetings, if we’ve arranged a videoconference. (If we have trouble arranging the meeting, don’t worry; I’ll have my machine talk to your machine.) The phone on my desk has become a land-line phone, because it isn’t wireless. My local Sears is now a physical store. Ugly terms, all. Sometimes, of course, expressive language outlasts its technology origins. For instance: Mind your P’s and Q’s. (A printing term from well before computer pagination came along.) A flash in the pan. (A Revolutionary War-era phrase for a musket whose gunpowder fires but that doesn’t shoot a bullet.) Sleep tight. (A reminder to tighten the ropes that formed a web and held up the mattress in many Colonial beds.) The whole nine yards. (An expression used by early machinegunners, whose bullets were on 27-foot-long bands. The full expression was something like, "I gave those dirty x%$*#! guys the whole nine yards.") But e-mail, in particular, is stretching language in new and unfortunate ways. No doubt enraging the ghost of Sister Victor, the term "e-mail" has become a noun, a verb, and an adjective. In my book (I mean my physical book), e-mail is also to blame for the growing loss of capital letters in English. My tech-bedazzled brother keeps sending me e-mails about "it" guys, who I thought were just the kids to avoid when we played tag way back when, but who turn out to be information-technology professionals. When he recently went to meet with some venture capitalists, he wrote: "i’ll be out of town next week. i am going to negotiate with some vc." I wished him better luck than Henry Kissinger had at the Paris peace talks. Most of the time I can figure out what my brother means, of course. But sometimes I have trouble. Book-bound dictionaries are way out of date. So I find myself imagining that megahertz is the feeling my five-year-old has when Brian bites him. Bandwidth sounds to me like a way of measuring whether the fat sousaphone player can fit through the high-school hallway. As you might imagine, when I call my company’s help desk (one of the biggest misnomers of the Digital Age), they speak very carefully, like I’m not too bright. Adding to my confusion is that while some words don’t change, their meaning does. A generation isn’t 25 years anymore, is it? No, it’s about 18 months. In other words, as long as it takes the vc to e-mail those it folks or get them on the cell (is cell a verb yet?) and arrange for a next generation of must-have devices to make it to market. Reading your Palm no longer has anything to do with fortune- telling. Likewise, hand-held is different than what my wife and I did on our first date. And forget the wax when you go surfing. Incidentally, when Brian finished playing with the family computer the other morning, he left the room shouting "Dot-com! Dot-com!" He was using the same tone I once used to yell "Ice cream!" I have no clue what led to this outburst, and I probably never will.
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