The Old New Thing

November 10, 2005 - The Old New Thing

The etymology of the word “traffic light”

November 10, 2005 Nov 10, 2005 11/10/05
Raymond Chen
Some languages are very creative with their term for those red/green thingies that control (or at least try to control) the flow of vehicular traffic. Swedish proves the least surprising in this respect (from a US English point of view), using the same term as US English. South African English is the funniest with their "robot". (It makes ...

When was the last time you formatted a floppy disk?

November 10, 2005 Nov 10, 2005 11/10/05
Raymond Chen
For some reason, I was reminded of the people who pooh-poohed Windows 95 because it didn't format floppy disks smoothly. Who spends all day formatting floppy disks? Even in 1995, when you bought a box of floppy disks, they came pre-formatted...