Strictly speaking | Retronym

Retronyms are newly coined words that remake or replace a pre-existing term in order to make room for innovations. For example, what has always been called “mail” (i.e. what comes in stamped envelopes to a street or postbox address), is now fondly known as snail mail – since its electronic equivalent (email) arrives only seconds after being dispatched. The type of “planes” that transport people and goods to country towns are now "propeller planes", because of the widespread use of smaller and faster jet planes. A puzzling retronym for non-musicians is "acoustic guitar"; do some guitars not produce “acoustic” sounds? It is a retronym to distinguish the traditional instrument from the modern "electric guitar", which amplifies sound electronically. A similar kind of formation is the term "non-binary", on record since 1995 according to the Oxford English Dictionary. The term "non-binary" reflects the spectrum of human gender identities that is not simply man or woman, in line with changing social understandings. Retronyms can even be acronyms, for example ICE, used to refer to cars with conventional "internal combustion engines", as opposed to EVs – the initialism for the increasingly common electric vehicles. Thus, changing technologies and social evolution can be expected to prompt the use of retronyms. We can also expect retronyms as phrases and acronyms to be bulkier than the straightforward terms they replace. Emeritus Professor Pam Peters is a researcher with the linguistics department at Macquarie University.