Words that seem immortal

The meanings have vanished, but the words lived on: Meet 12 “ghost” words

Language changes constantly, but rarely throws everything away at once. Sometimes a word outlives the object, machine, or technology that gave it meaning in the first place. We continue to use these expressions every day without thinking much about where they came from. From rotary telephones and film reels to carbon paper and floppy disks, these words are linguistic fossils that refuse to go away.

Millions of people dial phone numbers every day, even though most have never touched a rotary telephone. The word comes from a circular dial used on telephones throughout much of the 20th century. Users inserted a finger into a numbered hole and rotated the dial to place a call.

Automatic dialing systems began appearing in the late 1800s, and rotary phones remained common until push-button models spread during the 1960s and 1970s. The dial disappeared, but the verb stayed behind.

Ending a phone call is still called hanging up, despite the obvious fact that modern smartphones have nothing to hang. The phrase originated when telephone receivers were physically placed on wall-mounted hooks or cradles after a conversation ended.

The action activated a switch that disconnected the line. Telephone engineers still use the related terms "on-hook" and "off-hook," preserving language from a technology that most people no longer see.

Anyone who sends an email is familiar with CC, short for carbon copy. The term comes from carbon paper, a thin sheet placed between pages to create duplicate copies while typing or writing.

Carbon paper became widely used in offices during the 19th and 20th centuries. Although it has largely disappeared, email systems adopted the familiar abbreviations. Even BCC, or blind carbon copy, preserves a term from the typewriter era.

Today, nearly all video is digital, yet people still refer to recorded video as footage. The word originated in the motion-picture industry, where film was measured in physical feet.

Editors and cinematographers literally counted how many feet of film had been shot. In traditional 35mm filmmaking, one foot of film contained 16 frames. The physical measurement vanished, but the vocabulary survived.

People regularly rewind videos, podcasts, and streaming content if they want to move to an earlier moment in the media. The expression dates to a time when magnetic tape and film reels had to be physically wound backward to revisit an earlier section.

Cassette tapes, VHS tapes, and film projectors all required actual rewinding. Digital files contain no reels or tape, but the word remains the standard way to describe moving backward through media.

Many drivers still ask passengers to roll down the window. Originally, that instruction was completely literal. Car windows were operated by turning a hand crank connected to a mechanical regulator.

As power windows became widespread during the second half of the 20th century, the rolling action disappeared. Yet the phrase survived the transition from crank handles to electronic switches.

For decades, recording television programs meant using magnetic videotape. Home viewers relied on formats such as VHS and Betamax to capture shows, sporting events, and movies.

Streaming services and digital recorders eventually replaced videotape, but people still talk about taping a program. The tape itself may be gone, but the expression remains surprisingly common.

Broadcasters have been telling audiences to stay tuned for generations. The phrase originated during the early days of radio, when listeners adjusted tuning dials to find the correct frequency.

Early television sets worked similarly. Modern devices select channels electronically, yet the old instruction continues to signal that more content is coming.

Most movies, television shows, and online videos are now captured digitally. Nevertheless, people still film weddings, documentaries, interviews, and social media clips.

The word comes from photographic film stock, the light-sensitive material that defined cinema for more than a century. Even as digital cameras became dominant, the vocabulary of filmmaking remained largely unchanged.

When an incoming call arrives, we still say the phone is ringing. Early phones actually contained mechanical bells that produced a ringing sound whenever someone called.

Modern smartphones use speakers and digital sound files instead of physical bells. Yet, the connection between telephones and ringing remains so strong that few people notice the historical reference.

One of the most famous technological fossils appears every time users click the Save icon. On many programs, the symbol resembles a 3.5-inch floppy disk, once a standard method of computer storage.

Floppy disks became widespread during the 1980s and 1990s before largely disappearing in the early 2000s. Many younger users instantly recognize the icon despite never having used the device it represents.

Smartphones, tablets, and computers can record audio and video with a single tap. The term, however, comes from an era when sounds were physically stored on wax cylinders, records, and magnetic media.

Thomas Edison’s phonograph, introduced in 1877, was the first machine capable of recording and reproducing sound. Modern devices store digital data rather than physical grooves, but the original word still does the job.

Life inspires fiction

The true stories that inspired 10 world-famous pieces of literature

Many great books stem from real-life stories, but we often ignore to what degree. Few people know that, before Moby-Dick, there was a real whale that sank a ship and left its crew adrift for 90 days. Or that it was the four Alcott sisters living in Massachusetts who inspired the four March sisters from Little Women. The ten novels in this article have collectively sold hundreds of millions of copies; here are the true stories behind 10 of the most famous books ever written.

In the summer of 1816, the famous British poet Lord Byron was hosting a remarkable group in his rented home in Switzerland. Byron, Percy Shelley, and 18-year-old Mary Godwin found themselves one night having a conversation about galvanism and the possibility of reanimating corpses. Mary immediately conceived the idea for the ghost story that Byron had dared all of his guests to write.

It took her two years, and by age 20, Mary Godwin had become Mary Shelley and had published the novel about "the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together." The Gothic novel was published anonymously until 1831, when a revised edition recognized her as its author.

Another of Byron's guests that summer, John Polidori, wrote The Vampyre (1818) following the same dare. This book became a direct inspiration for Bram Stoker's Dracula.

The world's most famous fictional detective was a real person, and we know it because his creator said so in writing. Conan Doyle met Dr. Joseph Bell when he was studying to be a doctor at the University of Edinburgh in 1877. Bell's powers of diagnosis were extraordinary, and he often used to demonstrate the importance of close observation by selecting strangers and deducing their recent activities simply by observing them.

In a letter from Conan Doyle to Bell dated 1892, Conan Doyle wrote that Holmes’s analytical work was "not in the least an exaggeration of some effects which I have seen you produce in the out-patient ward." Bell had such renown that he also served as a personal surgeon to Queen Victoria during her visits to Edinburgh.

In 1820, an 80-ton sperm whale rammed and sank the Essex, an American whaling ship, in the Pacific Ocean off the coast of South America. The crew of 21 men escaped in small boats.

They spent 90 days adrift in the Pacific with dwindling supplies and were forced to make desperate choices. The remaining crew members needed to resort to cannibalism, and only 8 of the 21 survived. The ship's captain was George Pollard Jr., who returned to Nantucket and went to sea again on another ship, only to be shipwrecked a second time.

Author Herman Melville encountered Pollard once, briefly, on Nantucket. He wrote: "To the islanders, he was a nobody. To me, the most impressive man, tho' wholly unassuming, even humble, that I ever encountered." Melville turned this concept into a novel that became a quintessential American classic.

Louisa May Alcott didn’t want to write this book. In 1868, her publisher asked her to write "a book for girls." She protested, but it was her need for money that drove her to comply.

In her journal, she wrote: "Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it." Fortunately for literature, she was wrong. She wrote the entire first volume in just ten weeks. In it, Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy March were in real life Anna, Louy, Lizzy, and May Alcott.

She modeled the characters of the mother and the father on her own. The Alcott family had known Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne as personal friends and neighbors in Concord, Massachusetts. Alcott later attributed the book's success to its simplicity and truth. Her novel has never been out of print since 1868.

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a young student at Princeton in 1915 when he met Ginevra King at a party. She was a socialite: popular, pretty, and very rich. Fitzgerald idealized her and tried to court her through letters, to no avail. Later, Fitzgerald overheard a comment he recorded in his own journal: "Poor boys shouldn't think of marrying rich girls."

Fitzgerald would always remember the role Ginevra's wealth seemed to play in the breakup. This inspired him to write about the corrupting power of money over love in American life.

The novel was also inspired by the parties he attended in Long Island in 1922 with his wife, Zelda. Their glamorous, wealthy neighbors on one side of the bay contrasted sharply with the old-money families across the water, giving Fitzgerald the idea for West Egg and East Egg.

One day in 1862, Lewis Carroll took ten-year-old Alice Liddell and her two sisters on a boat trip from near Oxford, where they had a picnic. Alice begged him to tell a story, so he invented tales on the spot about a girl who fell down a rabbit hole and had fantastical adventures.

Alice Liddell asked him to write it down. So he did: he spent the next two years expanding and illustrating the story by hand, presenting the completed manuscript to Alice in 1864, as a Christmas gift.

He titled it Alice's Adventures Under Ground. A friend persuaded him to publish it, and he did so in 1865 under a pen name: Lewis Carroll, concealing his real name, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.

In the summer of 1881, Stevenson settled with his wife, Fanny, and his 12-year-old stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, in a cottage in Braemar, Scotland. Lloyd was confined inside because of the rain and amused himself by drawing a map of an imaginary island.

Stevenson joined him and began adding names to the map: Spyglass Hill, Skeleton Island, a stockade, and a cross marking buried treasure. Stevenson recalled that, before he knew it, he was scribbling down character names and even a list of chapters. He completed the first draft of chapter one the following morning.

Unfortunately, the original map was later lost in the mail when the manuscript was sent to the publisher. Stevenson had to redraw it entirely from memory. The character of Long John Silver was partly inspired by Stevenson's friend W.E. Henley, the poet who wrote Invictus and who, like Silver, had one leg.

Vlad the Impaler was born in 1431 in Transylvania, the second son of Vlad II Dracul. His surname "Dracula" meant "son of Dracul," which derived from the Latin draco, meaning "dragon," after his father's induction into a Christian military order called the Order of the Dragon.

Vlad earned his nickname for impaling more than 20,000 people during his Medieval reign and killing as many as 60,000 others. He was said to dine among his impaled enemies. Bram Stoker never visited Romania, but he came across a book about Wallachia in 1890, afterward writing in his research notes: "Dracula in Wallachian language means DEVIL". Stoker borrowed the name and the Transylvanian setting. His vampire novel was published in 1897 to immediate success.

In 1704, a 27-year-old Scottish sailor named Alexander Selkirk made a desperate decision: he demanded to be put ashore on an uninhabited island in the Pacific Ocean, after quarreling with the captain of his ship.

The captain agreed. Selkirk lived alone on the rugged 29-square-mile island for more than four years, subsisting on fish, lobster, goats, and seals, until he was rescued by a passing ship in 1709.

Writer Daniel Defoe, in England, read the published accounts about Selkirk's ordeal. He drew on them for his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe, though scholars note that Defoe wove in details from many other castaway narratives. The Selkirk connection became so embedded in history that the Chilean government renamed the island from "Más a Tierra" to "Robinson Crusoe Island" in 1966 to attract tourists.

In 1872, Leo Tolstoy read about a well-dressed woman jumping in front of a train at a railway station near his estate outside Moscow. Tolstoy and his wife, Sofia, knew the woman: she was Anna Stepanovna Pirogova, the 35-year-old mistress of one of the Tolstoys' closest neighbors. It was a landowner named Bibikov, who had abandoned her for the family's German governess.

Tolstoy became haunted by the circumstances surrounding Anna’s death. He put aside his ambitious project on Peter the Great and wrote a new story about a respected noblewoman who has an adulterous affair with an aristocrat. Anna Karenina was first serialized between 1875 and 1877 and published as a complete book in 1878. Writer Vladimir Nabokov called it "the greatest novel ever written."