This month, my column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the lingo of television – past, present, and very near future. Full access is restricted to subscribers (hint: great holiday gift); here’s an excerpt:
In the very beginning, it wasn’t clear that television – coined from Greek tele (far) and Latin-derived vision, and first used in 1907 to describe a purely hypothetical technology – would be the name of the new medium. The alternative telephote was proposed as far back as 1880, and televista in 1904. The American inventor Charles Francis Jenkins, who transmitted pictures of U.S. Secretary of Commerce (and later President) Herbert Hoover in 1923, called his system radiovision. Philo T. Farnsworth, who developed the first working electronic camera tube in 1927, called his invention an image dissector.
Purists like C.P. Scott, the British publisher and politician, sniffed at television’s hybrid origins. “Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it,” Scott said in 1936.
Read the rest of “Television, in Other Words,” including an explanation of new TV terms such as OTT, cord-never, and household-addressable.