night: Good point. I would distinguish between mouse and drive as follows: Mouse is ok because the gadget looks like a mouse. Drive, however, is a poor choice for something with no moving parts

By 2024 any word at all. misspelled or not, will have come to mean anything the writer wishes it to

At present: A drive drive drive drive is the flight of a ball in a baseball game, the outcome of which results in an automobile trip by the all-time home-run champion to a venue in which culturally-acquired concern for the proliferation of a keychain semiconductor memory is sponsored through the profits of a lumber mill whose continued existence depends upon the legalization of dredging a shallow river intended to convey logs downstream for further processing

A floppy drive was so called because floppy disks were inserted and written to or read from. From the point of view of the user it was a method of storing information for later retrieval. In a hard drive the disks were mounted within the unit. It was still a method of storing information for retrieval later. The original optical drives were used to retrieve information that had been stored on a CD, and later a DVD and also later used to store data on a CD or DVD. A thumb drive (or what ever you do or don't want to call it) is a method of storing information for retrieval later. The fact that nothing is driven is irrelevant; from the point of view of the user it does everything that the previous versions of drives did. You might as well complain about Newsweek being called a magazine because it isn't a building and there are no physical objects stored in it. The defense rests.

Doesn't the CD or DVD drive spin the medium? Also, HDD's?

Quote:

---

Doesn't the CD or DVD drive spin the medium? Also, HDD's?

---

Yup, so does the floppy drive. That's what bothers dale about the use of the term drive to refer to thumb drives. My point is that the spinning of media is invisible to the ultimate arbiter of language usage and therefore irrelevant to the definition of a drive.