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.
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.
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.