I think it would be a good thing for there to be a class in elementary or middle-school, one entire semester, devoted just to reviewing the ‘zeitgeist’ of everyday technology from just before the Industrial Revolution to present-day. So kids could learn at a very high-level what people did each day in order to communicate with each other; what media was used by society; what terms they might hear referred to by their parents and grandparents… for example:
- origins of communication – smoke signals to telegraph to telecommunications
- methods of data storage – stone tablets, khuipu, papyrus/paper, punched-card/tape, magnetic tape, hard discs, solid-state/flash …
- origins of photography, film, videotape and the various formats used to-date
- Media distribution: courier, newspapers, books, microfiche, radio, TV, early internet (RealPlayer, Flash), …
- origins of computing, tabulating, touch on WWII and the origin of digital computing, then origins of the Internet
Just showing a video clip of how some of the older technologies worked would help youth understand what was going on and the meaning of many terms.
The details wouldn’t need to get very deep, but it would really help to just see how things have changed, and where key terms in our language came from, and a sense of how the speed of knowledge and communications have changed over the ages and even within their parents’ lifetimes. Something to give them a perspective on just how different their life so far has been from the generations before.
I’m basically reiterating a lot (but not all) of what was in the History of Computation class in University, but this would be a much, much simpler curriculum aimed at middle-schoolers.
I’d guess they know the word even if they don’t think about the etymology. Just like the only phone I ever used with a physical dial belonged to my grandmother but I still knew what dialling a phone was (and didn’t make the connection until decades later when I saw it mentioned as a linguistic artifact like I’m doing now.)
Tape and Dial have a similar etymology, but in modern usage tape has fallen out of use in favour of the more generic ‘record’, while dial is still current.
Dial is used a lot less than it was, admittedly; if you want to make a voice call it’s usually from a stored contact or a number on a website so we just ‘phone’ or ‘call’ people most of the time.
But the physical act of interacting with a sequence of individal numbers to initiate a call? We don’t have a better word for that than ‘dial’
Tape though, there’s a very real chance that a young person can hear ‘tape’ and not have the slightest clue what that means.
That’s true, ‘tape’ is certainly more rare than it used to be, I do agree that it’s fading but I still think ‘the kids’ would have likely heard it from a parent (or grandparent at this point) and asked or gotten the jist from context.
Turn the lights on
Roll down the window.
That’s a good one, I actually had to look it up because I got stuck at thinking of turning a knob to turn on a radio, but those were after light bulbs.
Gaslights had knobs to control the flow before electricity.
