Monica Hesse, “Move Aside, .com: .wed, Other Domains Will Make Internet More Crowded” (Washington Post, Aug. 6, 2012)
“It’s funny, thinking about dot-com,” says Ben Zimmer. Zimmer is a linguist — he’s the executive producer of vocabulary.com — and he thinks a lot about the context and meaning of words. “Even though it still gets used, it’s most often used to refer to the original dot-coms of the late ’90s — the boom and bust. Perhaps for some time, it has had an almost nostalgic quality. It reminds you of that time.”
Now, “dot-com” is almost extraneous: Every business is a dot-com because every business has an Internet presence. There is a word for when this happens, for when technology moves forward more quickly than the words used to describe it, e.g., “dialing” a phone or “tuning” a radio. Linguists jokingly call them “anachronyms.”
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