Grammar Girl here, today Bill Walsh, a copy editor at The Washington Post and author of

the new book Yes I Could Careless, has some delightful insights on retro nims.

In other words, why we talk about things such as white milk, black raisins, and gin martinis.

Look out Matthew Modine and Charlene Tilton, there are new stars in town, sky stars.

That was Kent Brockman, the TV news anchor on The Simpsons, in an illustration of what

we call a retro nim.

Real people don't talk about sky stars, of course, or Matthew Modine or Charlene Tilton

for that matter.

But we do sometimes specify acoustic guitar, now that there are electric ones.

And postal mail or snail mail, now that there's email.

The term retro nim was coined by Frank Mankowicz, a former NPR president in Robert Kennedy

Aide, after he heard a football broadcaster refer to grass as natural turf.

Once you become attuned to retro nims, you'll find them everywhere.

Snow skiing as opposed to water skiing, a conventional oven as opposed to a microwave oven.

In most cases, retro nims are clarifiers, sometimes they're required for full clarity.

Guitar alone could mean acoustic or electric, but more often, they merely emphasize that

you don't mean the variant form.

For most people, skiing alone means snow skiing.

Mail alone means postal mail.

Coffee alone means caffeinated coffee.

And slash alone means forward slash.

An extra word is sometimes useful for parallelism.

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