watermark
WOR-tuh-MARK
noun
An identifying image or pattern
As anyone who has tried to counterfeit money can attest, watermarks are a doozy. Apart from paper currency and the odd certificate or diploma, I think you’re fairly unlikely to see a ‘traditional’ watermark in the wild. Far more likely is a digital watermark on anything from videos, photographs, documents or even audio files.
Anyway, this isn’t really a blog about digital watermarking, instead I want to focus on what have become known as linguistic skeuomorphs: certain words or phrases that retain elements from older forms or practices that are no longer relevant.
‘Skeuomorph’ is a Greek word meaning roughly ‘shape of a tool’, and comes originally from archaeology (archaeologists love Greece, who’d have guessed?). In archaeology, the word is used to describe objects or artefacts that have functional elements which had been preserved from earlier ‘versions’ of the object, but had lost their functional purpose. For example a terracotta pot with handles that are made to look like they’re made of rope. The pot does not need rope handles because the pottery can support itself, but it is mimicking earlier kinds of storage vessels like baskets which would have.
Perhaps the best known example of skeuomorphism these days is the floppy disk. If you show people in the street an icon of a floppy disk and ask them what it is you will notice a stark generational divide in their responses. Older people (or particularly technologically-minded younger people) might simply tell you that it’s a floppy disk, but younger people (use your judgement here to determine what ‘younger’ means) will probably tell you that it’s a ‘save icon’ or a ‘save button’. This makes sense, because you are far more likely to see a floppy disk in that context than you are in any other, as the technology is more or less obsolete. Another great example is a shutter sound on a smartphone camera. Smartphone cameras have no shutter, so there’s nothing to be making the noise.
Linguistic skeuomorphs operate similarly but in the realm of language. When, for example, was the last time you ‘hung up’ a phone? You may have ended any number of calls this morning or over the weekend, but how many of them involved you physically hanging up a handset? Similarly we ‘CC’ people into any number of emails, but when was the last time you loaded a typewriter up with carbon paper?
And so with ‘watermark’, which is a hangover from the traditional manufacturing of paper. Wet pulpy fibres were mushed together (technical term) on a wooden frame before a design unique to that particular paper manufacturer was impressed on the still-wet paper, leaving a shallow indentation. The indentation was not deep enough to really be seen on the finished paper, but could be observed in certain light conditions and if one knew what to look for.