What are the terms for language anachronisms?

I had a conversation about a year ago with someone about anachronisms in language. We both felt that there were terms for these things, but could neither recall nor find (via web search) satisfying answers. This came up again recently in a different discussion in a Lemmy community, and it’s driving me a little nuts. Help me Linguistics-Wan Kenobi; you’re my only hope.

So we have the term “skeumorphism,” which refers to oramental anachronism. I may be using “anachronism” incorrectly, but it’s the hammer I have. Skeumorphisms, in computers, refer to the graphical representations of things, but not the underlying concepts. There are similar linguistic anachronisms that I feel also have specific labels:

  • “disks” which are still in use, but are largely being replaced by solid-state, rectangular SSDs; but most people still call all persistent storage devices “disks.”
  • “film” to refer to movies, regardless of the media (increasingly digital and having nothing to do with film).
  • “rice” to refer to the process of fancifying something, like computer desktops
  • “desktops” to refer to computer GUI window managing interfaces
  • “files” and “folders” in computers

Are these all the same category of things? Is there a term for them?

  • Lvxferre@mander.xyzM
    1·
    8 months ago

    The process itself is known as semantic change, or semantic drift - you have a bunch of meanings that are associated with a morpheme, word or expression, and they changed over time. You can read further about it here.

    In special, your examples seem to be, for me:

    • ⟨disk⟩ - semantic widening from “storage device with a specific shape” to “any storage device regardless of shape”
    • ⟨film⟩ - metonymy from “pellicle used to store visual data” to the visual data itself
    • ⟨file⟩ and ⟨folder⟩ - metaphor, from physical paper sheets and the containers used to organise them to chunks of data and the virtual containers where it is organised.
    • ⟨desktop⟩ - that was a big chain of semantic changes. From “place over the desk” to “object placed over the desk” (i.e. desktop computer) to “a feature of the software commonly used in those objects”.

    I’m really unsure on ⟨rice⟩.