Going kinetic

“Bible-believing Christian”

“Traditional medicine.”

Come to think of it, “confessional Lutheran.”

“online friend” or “Facebook friend”
“web log” (which has become “blog”)
cell phone
landline phone

liberal/moderate Republican

List of retronyms.

Thanks to Carl @6 for the link to the list. They were amusing and informative. I had no idea that “Great” Britain was so called because there was also a “Little” Britain. Still, if “Ultimate Doom” was the first and not the last Doom, shouldn’t it be “Doom Prime?”

“Shooting war” is better than the euphemistic “kinetic war, just as the formerly used “Department of War ” compared to the euphemistic “Department of Defense.”

Tom, at 3, I’d counter with “conservative/moderate Democrat.”

Porcell @ 8, I wouldn’t counter your counter. Both parties used to have liberal, moderate, and conservative wings. And that’s exactly what made bipartisan governance possible (lib Dems working with lib Repubs, mod Dems working with … etc.). The ideological purges in both parties have only hurt us as a nation.

As a church musician, I think the term “pipe organ” makes an excellent retronym.

“old-fashioned liberal”

Paleo-conservative.

Some others not on the “List of retronyms”:

genuine leather
organic food
natural flavor
natural grass

Laptop computer (briefly winces at image of tape-drive IBM crushing one’s lap…)

> Laptop computer

I would think that the retronym would be “Mainframe Computer.”
Yes, to distinguish it from a laptop…

Well, clearly “retronym” itself is a retronym. I mean, before all these neologisms came along requiring us to distinguish some new thing from the former status quo, we just called retronyms “words”!

…And, assuming you bought (or understood) that, that means, yes, that retronyms are autological.

Closer to my heart, I might also add “microbrew” and “Parmigiano-Reggiano”.

All beers used to be microbrews. And, time was, all Parmesan cheese came from a particular region of Italy and not, say, from a green plastic canister filled with white plastic sponges.

@17

Why not just “good beer” in addition to microbrew

Kirk (@18), ah, but not all beers used to be good, even back when they were all microbrews! Martin Luther once complained to his wife about some bad beer he’d had, not as good as the stuff she made for him.

And, despite the fact that it is really not cool to say it, some macrobrews are good. Take for example the recently re-jiggered Schlitz. It is really a very good beer.

Can anyone tell me how the vote went in Congress for the big O’s ‘Kenesis’?

I’ll bet it was a close one!

Hahahaha!!! What a bunch of hypocrites the lefties are!!

Old Right

What’s needed just now is a tough “kinetic” war against the Islamic jihadists, as opposed to “engaging” them with futile diplomacy and fighting half-hearted wars such as the ones in Afghanistan and Libya.

We particularly need to fight the stealth Islamics such as the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Libya and CAIR in America. The trouble is just now is that the isolationists and pacifists are playing right into Obama’s shaky, weak, and feckless international policy that, despite the feint of Afghanistan and Libya, is a policy of appeasement.

The very word “kinetic war” is indicative of our weakness. Too bad we don’t have a Churchillian style leader to point out the hard reality that these Islamic jihadists are a real and formidable enemy.

unleaded gasoline

I think we’re failing to understand what a retronym is. It’s the name for a thing that used to exist in only one form, and refers to that original form with a qualification – because there are now new forms of that thing. In the case of gasoline, there used to only be “gas,” but we now say “regular gas” (retronym) because unleaded gas has been created. (I don’t mean to sound like I’m jumping on you Jeremy Lee. You just offered a good example of what a retronym is not. )

At one time, when the “automatic transmission” was being introduced into automobiles, “standard transmission” was the retronym referring to the common transmission using a foot clutch with the gear shift lever. But today the “automatic transmission” is the standard transmission in automobiles, and the so-called “standard transmission” is less common. Now the old retronym, “standard transmission” is referred to with the retronym, “manual transmission.”

Does anyone know of any other retronym that has been replaced by yet another retronym?

It’s probably a stretch to call it a retronym, but one might consider “clockwise.”

Back when sundials were used to determine the time of day (when the sun was shining!), the movement of the shadow of the style across the surface of the faceplate was said to move in a “sunwise” direction. Whether this “sunwise” movement of the shadow was left-to-right or right-to-left depended in which hemisphere the sundial was located. When mechanical clocks were being invented, the hour hand (and later the minute and second hands) were set up so they turned in the same “sunwise” direction as the inventors saw on their sundials (It goes without saying in what hemisphere such mechanical clocks were invented.) As the use of these mechanical clocks became more common throughout both hemispheres, the term “clockwise” replaced “sunrise” as a less ambiguous term defining a certain rotational direction.

That shoudl be “sunwise” in the next to last line.

Near Beer.

Automatic Weapon.