"Tape" endures
« previous post | next post »
The word videotaping is still often used to mean "video recording", even though what's meant is recording digital video to a solid-state storage device, most often on a phone — video recording to tape has gone the way of buggy whips.
References to filming also remain common, referring both to commercial movie creation and everyday photography, though no "film" is involved in most of the events referenced.
We can add these to the many other cases where extended meanings persist after the literal source is gone, like rein in.
Michael Carasik said,
September 12, 2025 @ 8:26 am
Here in Israel, where everyone has a cell phone, you still see ads that say "dial" (חייג) such-and-such a number.
Richard Olson said,
September 12, 2025 @ 8:43 am
I have been dialing for decades on touch-tone phones at work (when I was still working) and at home. I still have a land line phone on my desk. It even has a button to push to redial.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 12, 2025 @ 9:04 am
To "tape" (without using literal old-style magnetic tape as the storage medium) is also still current for making audio recordings, especially (to judge from some superficial googling) in the recording of podcast episodes (assuming "episode" is the right word in the podcast trade for a single instance of a repeated series).
I also noticed a headline with the intriguing suggestion "Stop Duct-Taping AI Agents Together," so a metaphorical extension of a taping activity still performed (when non-metaphorical) with literal physical tape.
B.D.Finch said,
September 12, 2025 @ 9:25 am
Perhaps related is the popular phrase "video FOOTAGE" – referring to linear feet of film or vhs tape.
George Lane said,
September 12, 2025 @ 9:27 am
At my university in the 90s, there was a clear delineation between journalism majors, who used tape, and film majors who used film. In my TV production classes, if one of my classmates referred to us "filming" something, they would be sternly reprimanded by the professor, "We don't film, we tape!"
To this day I'm still so wary of using the wrong term that I've personally settled on using the generic term "video," as in, "I videoed Clint balancing a bottle on his head."
Philip Taylor said,
September 12, 2025 @ 9:49 am
Speaking as a founder member of the Society for the Preservation of Older Technology, I regular scream at my screen "I don’t <adverb> tap, I click" !
Y said,
September 12, 2025 @ 2:20 pm
A well-penned post.
Tom said,
September 12, 2025 @ 2:38 pm
But taping and filming are both actions. Why has the noun "film" persisted while "tape" has gone out? ( "I watched the whole film" vs "I listened/watched the whole tape."). I'm guessing it has to do with the fact that "film" conflates the medium with a single instance while tape usually does not (i.e., a "tape" usually has multiple songs or videos on it).
Joe said,
September 12, 2025 @ 3:27 pm
"rein in" for anything other than a horse has always been a metaphor though, while "tape" and "film" were literal words for an action that only became technically incorrect when the means changed. No one ever literally put a bridle on their child or husband or spending.
J.W. Brewer said,
September 12, 2025 @ 9:11 pm
@Tom: in the audio context I, in the old days, would generally not have said I'd listened to the whole tape.* I would instead have said I'd listened to e.g. the whole cassette, cartridge, or reel, depending on the exact physical format at hand. (Although taped audio physically embodied in cartridge format was often so short in duration it would have been somewhat odd to specify you'd listened to the whole thing, and in radio jargon, at least, cartridge was often clipped to "cart.")
*Possible exception if the recording in question was in some specific genre generically known as e.g. an audition tape or a demo tape.
Peter Taylor said,
September 13, 2025 @ 1:11 am
In Spanish too one still talks about seeing a película (film with a parallel derivation to English: originally a membrane, then applied specifically to a thin tape of celluloid, then by metonym to the imagery recorded thereon), but the verb for recording (whether on celluloid or on an SD card) is grabar, which is an obvious cognate of engrave. I assume it was borrowed from lithography.
Philip Taylor said,
September 13, 2025 @ 3:11 am
« "rein in" for anything other than a horse has always been a metaphor though » — although "rein" as used in this context is generally restricted to equines, as a child I wore reins so that my mother could ensure that I did not (for example) rush out into the road, so I would suggest that one can literally "rein in" an over-exuberant child just as one can "rein in" an over-exuberant horse.
Yuval said,
September 13, 2025 @ 1:48 pm
I have posted about the Hebrew "dial" usage back in the day.
Tom said,
September 13, 2025 @ 2:26 pm
@J.W.Brewer – Fair enough. If I had a VHS tape of my family, I might have said, "I watched the tape of her birthday party", although I wouldn't say that today if I had a video recording of it on my phone. According to Google Ngrams, "cassette" and "tape" have both dropped off since their 1980s peak, while "film" has gone up (although Ngrams doesn't differentiate between nouns and verbs, I think).
Kimball Kramer said,
September 14, 2025 @ 2:49 pm
In the iPhone App Store there is an app called “vintagePhone”. Downloaded it presents a picture of an old phone dial with letters and numbers. If you “dial” a working number using your finger on the iPhone picture, the dial appears to rotate appropriately and actually calls and connects you to the party you dialed. So it is still possible to use the iPhone to dial someone.
Kris said,
September 15, 2025 @ 3:32 pm
Well, it's still possible to pretend to dial someone on an iPhone, at least. It has echoes of "ceci ne pas composer" to me.
Tony DeSimone said,
September 20, 2025 @ 8:37 am
Regarding dialing: we haven't dialed a phone since the dials came off the phone. Forget iPhones; even with TouchTone we referred to punching the buttons as dialing.