Coming up on Word Matters, the questions that have been on your mind.
I'm Emily Brewster and Word Matters is produced by Merriam-Webster in collaboration with New England Public Media.
On each episode, Merriam-Webster editors Neil Servin, Aminche,
Peter Sokolowski and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Each week, we ask listeners to send us any language-related questions that have been on their minds,
and our listeners consistently come through with thought-provoking queries.
I'll take the first one.
We have a question from Doug Barrick, who writes,
Regarding hot yoga and cold yoga, I wanted to provide an alternative view.
I'm a sometimes practitioner of the former, and I was told once by my yogi,
or maybe yogini, that the hot yoga tradition reflects yoga's roots in India where it was hot.
European and North American yoga in climate-controlled buildings came along later and was colder.
So this is addressing whether or not Hot yoga is a true retronym
because hot yoga may be the first kind of yoga.
Now Doug's question reminds me of some correspondence that we got also about our retronym piece.
There were a number of people who wrote to address the fact that film camera is a term that was used before digital cameras existed.
That film camera was a term for a new kind of camera that was contrasted with the camera obscura and with the daguerreotype.
So film camera also, in theory, is not a true retronome.
But... I think that, in truth,
both hot yoga and film camera still qualify as retro-nims simply