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You're listening to Away With Words. I'm Grant Barrett. And I'm Martha Barnett. The other day I was

driving someplace, but then I got lost. So I pulled up to a traffic light, and I turned to the driver in the car next to me to ask her if I was headed in the right direction. But she had her windows up. And so I tried to catch her eye. And then I used that gesture that you make when you want somebody to lower their window.

You make a fist and you make it go in a circle. But later I thought, wait, when's the last time I ever lowered my window with that kind of circular motion? I don't think I've done that since the 1990s. No, you've got a button. You just press the button down the window goes or up the window goes, right? Yeah, exactly. And it occurred to me, Grant, that this motion that I used is sort of the gestural equivalent of one of your favorite words, skew-o-bar.

Oh, yeah.

Sure.

Exactly.

And it's spelled S-K-E-U-O-M-R-P-H.

And it's what you have when an element of design is preserved in something, even though it's no longer necessary. Like, for example, maybe you have a light fixture over your dining room table, and it's got those little bulbs in it that look like candle flames. I mean, what is that about? Yeah, you don't eat those anymore, right? No, no, we haven't had those since, you know, middle ages or something. Even some of the nicer radios that you can buy, like the big console radios that you might put behind your television on a big wall, they have fake wood grain because radios used to be made with wood, right? A wooden cabinet. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? Most people probably know skeuomorphs from their phones. From their phones. Because if you get a voicemail, there's a really good chance that the icon that pops up to tell you that is an icon that looks like the old reel-to-reel tape machine. Oh, yeah. Or more like a little mini-cassette. And when was the last time you played a cassette? You're right. Or a reel to

real for that matter, right? Gosh. And now that you mention it, I think of those little things

looking like the cartridge that you put in your Instomatic camera. Wow, that really dates me.

Well, another one on your phone. Just pick up your smartphone and look, and I bet you'll find

something that's related to the telephone, some icon or symbol,

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