Benjamin Dreyer, author of the wonderful book, Dreyer's English, has an article in the Washington Post (gift link) in which he ruminates on anachronyms, a term I have to admit I hadn't come across until reading the article. He starts off by talking about subtweets.
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.
He goes on to talk about several other similar terms, among them "subway token booths" (tokens now having been eliminated in New York and Toronto), and "podcasts" (the iPod having long been discontinued).
I wonder how long we will continue to call our omnipresent digital terminals "phones". How many phone calls have you made on your cell phone in the last week?
