Tuesday, March 03, 2009
Dongle update
Well, now, not long ago, Mr. Verb (over?)confidently described the noun dongle as 'now-common'. I sauntered into our tech store today and told the young woman at the desk that I needed a dongle. She pointed to her colleague and said 'can you help this gentleman?' I repeated the question to him and he clearly did not understand, even after I repeated it. I described the object, he asked about the computer it was for and handed me one (they were directly behind his and the young woman's desks). I followed up by asking if he really didn't know the word, and he confirmed that he did not. I asked what they called them and the reply was "video display adapter". I would figure that dongle is really the class is all such attachment dealies and not just this particular one, but he clearly didn't know the word. Hmmmmm.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
4 comments:
Your sense of the term does not seem to appear at http://catb.org/jargon/html/D/dongle.html .
I think it was extended from sense 3 there. Everyone I know has called those video adapters dongles for years. I definitely had a laptop in 2000 or so that had a dongle for the PCMCIA ethernet card, and when I replaced it with a PowerBook in 2004 I immediately called the video adapter a dongle. Considering how many other people I've met who do the same thing (i.e. every CS person I know, plus the more tech oriented people in my department), I think it was just an obvious extension.
I've seen it in print in this meaning too.
I've never seen it anywhere but here, to be honest.
Post a Comment