"Ya know dale..........Natural language change doesn't work that way. There's a Latin example involving repetitions of the string malo.....but no one would have ever spontaneously said it in quotidian speech. You might claim that using the term drive ...... is going to cause confusion, but to the computer and to the computer user the thing...... looks exactly like a hard drive......And nobody's going to be confused........"--Fal
You seem to defend with equal vehemence the use of "hard drive" to describe a keychain semiconductor random-access memory, for some reason giving me pause so I am wondering if other newly-converted descriptivists in the group might have had the same reaction
Nope. A hard drive is one with hard disks of a recording medium inside a container of some sort. The device variously known as a thumb drive, a flash drive, or any number of other names is not called a hard drive. The 3-1/2 inch floppy was called a floppy not because it sorta looked like a 5-1/4 inch floppy but because the medium inside the hard case was the same, floppy medium as that in the 5-1/4 inch floppy that happened to be in a more floppy case. One reason for not using the term random access memory might be that one of the features of RAM in modern computers is that the memory is volatile, that is, it doesn't retain the memory when power is lost. Such a feature would make a flash drive totally useless.
