Retronyms

Let’s watch Star Trek!

During the late 80s, if you heard this in my home, you might be in for a surprise if you agreed to watch the show, only to discover that it was the new version of the classic series. As a Gen X kid, I strongly preferred Star Trek: The Next Generation over Star Trek: The Original Series.

You’re thinking: wait a sec. Twenty years earlier, the TV show wasn’t called The Original Series, but instead just Star Trek.

You’re right. This is one of those weird examples of a retronym, a new phrase made up by modifying an existing one. It’s not like Gene Roddenberry envisioned a sequel TV series to come some 20 years later when he created the original Star Trek, so when the new series came out and many just started calling it Star Trek, we had to come up with a distinction.

You don’t always see a sequel coming.

It’s also not like the Allied and Central Powers from the First World War got together to talk about branding and sequels. Instead, the War to End All Wars very much wasn’t what its initial name implied, and its other name—The Great War—was rebranded out of necessity, as an even greater conflagration followed suit roughly two decades later.

Cloth diaper manufacturers did not call them cloth diapers. They were just diapers, right up until plastic diapers began to replace them around the time of Star Trek: The Original Series. Today, we’re more likely to call plastic diapers simply diapers, but grocery stores will almost certainly have a smaller, featured cloth diaper section.

Here’s another good one: “I’ll send that to you by snail mail.” Back during the TV run of The Next Generation, there was only one type of mail most people used. Email existed back then, but very few people had even heard of it. Today, if someone is going to send you a piece of paper by way of the national postal service, you’re likely to hear them calling it snail mail.

Cloth diapers. World War I. Star Trek: The Original Series. Snail mail.

All of these modifiers that are added later on point out the differences between what came later, and the original. Old diapers used to be made of cloth, but that’s no longer the case most of the time. Star Trek is only the original series because there was another series that came after.

Why do these things happen? We’ve already talked about how there needs to be an unexpected sequel of sorts. If there’s only one of a thing, you don’t often have to rename that thing.

A sequel isn’t enough, though.

Imagine a pencil. If you’re like most people, you’re envisioning a cylindrical piece of wood with a smaller cylinder of graphite inside, probably with an eraser at the top with a little metal band attaching the eraser to the pencil. To sharpen it, you put it into a pencil sharpener and shave the wood down to a point.

Now, think of a mechanical pencil. You have to push the eraser at the top to “sharpen” it, and the apparatus is almost entirely made of plastic. There’s a very thin, wire-like cylinder of graphite in there, way thinner than the other type of pencil.

We don’t call this modern invention a pencil, but instead keep that for the previously existing paradigm. Why did this happen with pencils, but not with diapers?

This touches on another necessary condition for a retronym to appear: the new version has to be bigger or more prominent than the older version. Somehow, the new thing has to be so important to the public that we start calling it the old thing, and no longer even want to acknowledge the older thing’s place in history.

This happened with diapers, as mothers living through the 70s and 80s saw their workload reduced significantly with the advent of disposable diapers. Nowadays, cloth diapers are making a comeback as environmental and health concerns take center stage, but there were several decades where cloth diapers were just not cool.

Now, it’s your turn. Tell me what retronyms you’ve noticed in your own life! Did you watch either Star Trek show while growing up? Do you clarify the original series in some way? What do you think of cloth diapers and World War I?