Offline post

It is interesting to see how the English language is evolving to help us understand the changing world better. One example is the retronym – it is fast becoming an enabler to help us come to terms with the past world and let it co-exist with the present, and, indeed, the future. A bridge across time, perhaps.

Some retronyms are so old that we don’t think of them as such – Black & White Televisions, field hockey, forward slash, heterosexual, live action, and natural language are some examples. (An interesting one here is the senior George Bush, who, by virtue of his son also being a public figure, now goes by the retronymic George H.W. Bush.)

Some of the newer ones we recognize as retronyms and use in everyday parlance include snail mail, post-paid cards (for mobile phone calling cards), landline telephone, live chat, offline, and hard copy.

So what are the retronyms that are likely to come up in the future?

With online communities becoming popular, will the non-online (oops, that sounds like a retronym as well!) version be referred to as real communities?

Thanks to Yahoo! Photos, FlickR, and the like, what will the normal photo albums be called? Hard pictures?

As we start building virtual identities on Orkut and the like, what will our true names be?

If mobile devices as computers become the standard, will we start referring to our laptops as non-mobile computers?

If the Second Life takes off, will our current life be referred to as First Life?

And if home offices and telecommuting become norms, what will our offices be called? Office offices?

(By the way, I composed this post offline on MS Word before copying it into the "Create Post" textbox. So what does that make this?)