How do people come up with new words for new inventions, like the word “film” or “movies” or “video” for when they invented video recording?

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Like when they created that riding horse video that it is the first video created, using the idea of frames per second and motion image. How do people think: wow let’s call this a movie, let’s call this a video etc

Or when they invented the train, they just go like “look at this amazing way of transportation, let’s call it a train”

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Film is a pretty good example for how words change over time – it derives from old English *filmen*, a thin skin or hide, from germanic *fello*, an animal hide, ultimately from proto-indo-european *pel-* from which the somewhat related word *pelt* and terms like *pellagra* (a skin condition) are also derived. From the sense of “a thin skin”, *film* started being used to mean “a membrane” or “a thin layer” by way of metaphor – we still use *skin* and *film* in this sense, like, “there’s a gross film forming on top of that old yoghurt”. When early photographic film was made by depositing a thin layer of chemicals on plates, the term “film” was used for it in a literal way, just the “thin layer” meaning. Eventually when film started being made with the chemicals on paper or celluloid the term started being used for the whole product. And by extension, “film” get applied to early motion picture film itself, and by further extension, to the act of recording on film, as well as the finished product, a complete film. An English speaker from the middle ages would probably be quite confused as to how we send thin layers of animal skin to each other over the internet, you know, among several other things about our society. But the progression of the development of the word at each step made logical sense at the time as an extended or metaphorical use of an already-used word

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