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	<title>Nick Gall &#187; language</title>
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		<title>What does one call the term that causes the emergence of a complementary retronym?</title>
		<link>http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_gall/2008/10/18/what-does-one-call-the-term-that-causes-the-emergence-of-a-complementary-retronym/</link>
		<comments>http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_gall/2008/10/18/what-does-one-call-the-term-that-causes-the-emergence-of-a-complementary-retronym/#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 18 Oct 2008 04:14:03 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>Nick Gall</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[fun]]></category>
		<category><![CDATA[language]]></category>

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		<description><![CDATA[[This post was triggered by a fun discussion in the comments on the post Is &#8216;Wireless&#8217; Anemic or Merely Retrospective?] When the term &#34;electric guitar&#34; became nearly as popular as the original unmodified word &#34;guitar&#34;, the term &#34;acoustic guitar&#34; emerged because &#34;guitar&#34; (unmodified) was considered ambiguous. &#34;Acoustic guitar&#34; is labeled the retronym. What is &#34;electric [...]]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>[This post was triggered by a fun discussion in the comments on the post <a href="http://blogs.gartner.com/nick_gall/2008/10/17/is-wireless-anemic-or-merely-retrospective/">Is &#8216;Wireless&#8217; Anemic or Merely Retrospective?</a>]</p>
<p>When the term &quot;electric guitar&quot; became nearly as popular as the original unmodified word &quot;guitar&quot;, the term &quot;acoustic guitar&quot; emerged because &quot;guitar&quot; (unmodified) was considered ambiguous. &quot;Acoustic guitar&quot; is labeled the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retronym" target="_blank">retronym</a>. What is &quot;electric guitar&quot; labeled?</p>
<p>Certainly, both &quot;electric guitar&quot; and &quot;acoustic guitar&quot; are neologisms. But I think it would be useful to have a word to denote the neologism (&quot;electric guitar&quot;) that caused the retronym neologism to come into being. I looked around and didn&#8217;t find any such word. Before I coined one myself, I wanted to make sure that there wasn&#8217;t one already out there. So I am asking here.</p>
<p>BTW, if there is nothing else out there, I&#8217;m thinking of coining the word &quot;specinym&quot; for &quot;specialized term.&quot; Retronyms come into being when someone puts a specialized qualifier in front of a word denoting a concept that previously did not have any &quot;species&quot; and then the specialized term becomes popular.</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s how I would use &quot;specinym&quot; in a sentence: &quot;The popularization of a specinym like &#8216;electric guitar&#8217; is what leads to the creation of a retronym like &#8216;acoustic guitar&#8217;.&quot; Got any better proposals? How about &quot;neonym&quot;?</p>
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