Coming up on Word Matters, what's old is new again, and the and symbol.
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, Amin Shea, Peter Sokolowski,
and I explore some aspect of the English language from the dictionary's vantage point.
Even if you haven't heard the word for them, you encounter them on a regular basis.
think black coffee or acoustic guitar.
It's when a new term gets created to refer to the older, original version of a thing.
I'll explain.
A retronym is a term that's created or adopted to distinguish the original or older version of something from another more recent version.
So a classic example is acoustic guitar.
There is no need for the term acoustic guitar until there was such a thing as an electric guitar,
similar to film camera.
There was no need to refer to a film camera until there was such a thing as a digital camera.
So the word retronome was coined by Frank Mankowicz,
who's an American journalist and former president of NPR.
And he apparently kept an extensive list of retronomes,
having not just coined the word, but also being a great collector of retronomes.
We don't have his list, but I have a list of my own.
Often they are a compound term like acoustic guitar, but not always.