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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Fal: Only partly true. Eg, you want to be careful how you use the neologism "gay"
dalehileman
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addict
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addict
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It was just a little holiday rant that would have been much more difficult to compose in ME. 
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Joined: Jul 2005
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
Joined: Jul 2005
Posts: 1,773 |
Fal: Absolutely true in every respect. Yet the pre- might maintain, with some justification, that "drive" should never have come to mean a serial semiconductor memory often hanging from a keychain; suggesting instead that the coinage of a new word might have been better
Of course as a newly fledged de- I wouldn't; now I merely bend over and slide down my britches
dalehileman
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Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Jul 2000
Posts: 3,467 |
Quote:
Fal: Absolutely true in every respect. Yet the pre- might maintain, with some justification, that "drive" should never have come to mean a serial semiconductor memory often hanging from a keychain; suggesting instead that the coinage of a new word might have been better
Of course as a newly fledged de- I wouldn't; now I merely bend over and slide down my britches
Quote:
Yet the pre- might maintain, with some justification, that "drive" should never have come to mean a serial semiconductor memory often hanging from a keychain; suggesting instead that the coinage of a new word might have been better
I don't know why not. Isn't a drive a place where data is stored, whether hard, floppy, virtual, portable, solid-state, or whatever other adjective might be thrown at it?
While the technical definition of a drive is a device that spins disks or tapes in order to read and write data; for example, a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, or tape drive, in reality we do not use the word that way. "Write it to the floppy drive." "Store it on the hard drive." We LONG ago (post-modernally speaking) stopped thinking of a drive as a motor that turns a disk or moves a tape.
TEd
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Joined: Dec 2000
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Dec 2000
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Quote:
While the technical definition of a drive is a device that spins disks or tapes in order to read and write data; for example, a hard drive, floppy drive, CD-ROM drive, or tape drive, in reality we do not use the word that way. "Write it to the floppy drive." "Store it on the hard drive." We LONG ago (post-modernally speaking) stopped thinking of a drive as a motor that turns a disk or moves a tape.
Good point. However, I might write to a hard drive, where the medium and the mechanics are one unit, but in the case of a CD or, if you have an old enough machine, a floppy, you write to the dis(c,k) not the drive. But in the case of the USB thumb drive, we're back to the medium and the mechanics being a unit again. Certainly to the computer it looks the same as, say, a hard drive. This seems to be enough. There's also the tendency of terminology to be more conservative than the technology of which it speaks. Cf., dialing a touch tone phone.
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