Roots
New names for old words
Deepti

THERE are around 50 words in English that end in the suffix -nym. Pseudonym, acronym and synonym are among the common ones but there are the rare ones like autonym, mononym and paronym too. The suffix that ends these words is a variant of the Greek ‘onoma’ that means ‘name’.

An autonym is a book published under the author’s real name, mononym is a term consisting of one word only and a paronym is a word derived from another. ‘Retronym’ is the recent word added to the list and it refers to words that could become outdated but manage to stay on by taking on adjectives; for example, the word ‘mail’ added on the adjective ‘snail’ to become snail mail when email threatened to obliterate it. So, a retronym is a word that has been modified because of technology or modernism. The words ‘live performance’, ‘real cream’ and ‘print journalism’ are all retronyms.

Retronyms are born when changes in technology or the world create new words. To show the connection, the new coinages are called neonyms or new names. When the digital watch came into being, the word watch took on the adjective analogue and became the analogue watch. Similarly, the digital computer created the retronym analogue computer. The neonym digital photography gave birth to the retronym conventional photography. With the creation of biological, conventional and nuclear weapons, the earlier weapons came to be called conventional weapons.

There are many such sets of retronyms/neonyms in language at any given time, just a look around yields so many like: human translation/ machine translation, natural light/artificial light, network television/ cable television, two parent family/single parent family, joint family/nuclear family, print book/e-book and desktop computer/laptop computer. Sometimes, words may look like retronyms but are actually contrastive or distinguishing terms, like, for example biological parent/birth mother/adoptive mother.

Retronym also refers to a word or phrase that becomes another one when spelt backwards. There are many word games that make use of this sense. The word ‘mood’, written backwards, becomes ‘doom’ and ‘desserts’ becomes ‘stressed’.