Retronyms

With the advent of electrical and digital versions of our old technology. The old names tend to shift away from the old and on to the new, so what do you call the old? That’s where retronyms come from. It’s a new name for an old version of the same thing.

A guitar was just a guitar until the electric guitar came. So how do you set apart the old-fashioned non-electrified version? Call it acoustic. Before online stores, there were only physical locations to buy stuff. In the internet age, online stores were also places to buy stuff, but going in a virtual world rather than the physical world. Hence the term “brick and mortar”, referring to the building materials of a physical store as opposed to 1’s and 0’s, the building blocks of the digital age. TV was just TV when it was carried through airwaves. Then cable TV came along, so the old-style TV needed a name to set it apart, “broadcast” or “over-the-air” in America, or “FreeView” in the UK. 

I’m sure that the practice of retronymming is as old as technology. Raw food was just food before the discovery of fire. Now that cooked food exists, we have to call the old version of food something, right? Raw!

List of retronyms - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia