Linguistic retrospective shows endless creative flexibility
Remember when emulation meant imitating the behaviour of an admired mentor, and an icon was a religious symbol?
Not so very long ago, a bug was an insect, and a virus a disease-carrying organism that caused such physical ills as a cold. Backup meant physical or moral support.
To boot was an action carried out mostly by bar or club bouncers, who ejected undesirable people from the premises. A browser was an animal -- a giraffe, say, that wandered around eating leaves from trees, and encryption was something done in secret by military organizations.
The term mining was applied to gold, not data, and firewalls were safety features of large buildings. Hardware meant tools and home repair equipment sold in brick-and-mortar stores named accordingly. Java referred to a cup of coffee, and lurking meant standing unseen in the shadows, often wrapped in an overcoat and wearing a hat pulled low.
The net was a requirement for waitresses, intended to prevent stray hairs from landing in the customers' food. A notebook was something you wrote in with a pen, or carried in your purse to make lists in those days before cell phones became ubiquitous.
An option was any choice you made, and a path was a way through the forest. Pasting meant handling a sticky substance, a program was a radio show, and resolution meant determination, or else a January promise about what you would and wouldn't do in the coming year.
Spam was sandwich meat, and surfing a pleasure restricted to seaside vacations. A terminal was a bus station, a thread went through the eye of a needle, and the Trojan horse was an element from the plot of a nearly forgotten epic called The Iliad.
Virtual meant almost, user was a euphemism for drug addict, and cookies were for eating.
The field of computing has created a whole new range of vocabulary, proving once again the enormous creativity, flexibility and expansive capacity of human language.