It's years since Dixons stopped stocking video cassette recorders. Even writing this, I'm conscious that I used the untruncated term for the device rather than 'VCR', thinking too many readers will have forgotten what a VCR is.
Nevertheless, although it's gradually being replaced by 'Sky-plussing', 'to tape' is still in common use, as people record TV on to their hard disks. Did it take longer for people to stop talking about horseless carriages? Probably.
The point is, when something new comes along, people always attempt to conceptualise it in terms of the familiar.
This was always true of the web, where radio stations stream radio, TV stations stream TV, and newspapers publish newspapers. It's true, too, of new mobile devices such as the iPad, where so much of the talk has been about using it as an ebook reader.
The trouble is that it has the wrong kind of screen for this sort of use; bright, backlit and battery-hungry. For text, it's much better to use an e-ink-based reader such as a Kindle, which has batteries that last a month, is light and can be read in daylight without causing eyestrain.
That hasn't stopped thousands of books being published for the iPad, including on the Kindle app for iPad; but it's a compromise at best, which doesn't really move the medium on.
In other sectors, however, they are reinventing the concept of publishing to build around the unique and new features of the tablet.
Nowhere more so than in children's books, where colour, graphical style and images have always spiced up the text. Kids' books on the iPad come with animation that helps move the story on, narration that can be a parent's voice, interactive activities such as colouring, and ideas borrowed from gaming such as shaking the screen to jumble items up.
Publishers such as Penguin, Disney and Atomic Antelope (maker of the lauded Alice in Wonderland app) are reworking concepts from the ground up, rather than rehashing books and making them readable on your Apple fingerprint-collection device.
In music, a similar revolution might be starting, as artists start to get to grips with the new things they can do as they break the tyranny of what could be delivered on CD.
Bluebrain, a Washington DC-based band, has recently released The National Mall album as an iPhone app, claiming it is the first location-aware album. It uses the phone's GPS to control the music that plays, so if you're standing by the Lincoln Memorial, you'll hear something different from someone by the White House.
I've no idea which is better, but it fulfils one key objective for the artist: it's not free. Bluebrain isn't alone in trying to move the idea of the album on. Feature-film music composer Dave Grober's app combines music, descriptions of production techniques, video and individual instrument tracks. Such an initiative is likely to take off as artists search for new ways to distribute their product in forms that can be turned to profit effectively.
So while papers such as The Guardian and The Times have launched interesting apps, they can be viewed as moving the newspaper on, rather than inventing a fresh design. Even Rupert Murdoch's well-received iPad-only The Daily is referred to as an 'iPad newspaper'.
A year into the tablet revolution, there is still a lot of excitement about what they (and the iPad in particular) might bring, but we're still mostly reinterpreting old formats. So when ideas are genuinely fresh-platform originals, they stand out - even if the language we use struggles to keep up.
- Andrew Walmsley is a digital pluralist
30 SECONDS ON ... THE GUARDIAN AND THE TIMES IPAD APPS
- The Guardian's Eyewitness app is a self-updating gallery of photographs, which builds on the newspaper's flagship double-page photo series.
- Each time the app is opened, it will download the latest 100 photographs for users to browse or save as favourites.
- Every image is annotated with a 'pro tip', written by picture editors, explaining the photograph's technical and artistic attributes.
- The app is free, and requires a wi-fi connection to download new images.
- Images can be shared, either via an email link or on Facebook.
- The Times offers a free 30-day trial of its iPad edition, after which users can buy 30 days' access for £9.99 or subscribe to the newspaper's online version and receive the iPad edition for free.
- The app features specially designed Monday to Saturday editions of the paper, but does not include The Sunday Times.
- The app features audio and video content.
- There is no need for wi-fi access to see the content.