Got any skeuomorphs?

TurkeyMustard — Sat, 06 May 2006 12:52:25 -0800

What are some things that retain useless or vestigal features of earlier versions of the technology? These are usually called skeuomorphs (sometimes spelled "skiamorphs," though not often). This concept is most common in design and architecture, but I am especially interested in words that are skeuomorphic.

Examples are:

—Wood grain on radios, lawn chair arms, and automobiles.

—Lights shaped like candles.

—"Dialing" a phone, now doubly skeuomorphic in the age of VOIP where we might just click on a name to Skype someone.

—"Turning off" a light.

—Web sites that are made to look like the thing they represent, like an online book that includes curled page corners, a cover, "next page" links. etc., or a shopping site that is an image of a store with things on shelves. An example.

—Shopping cart icons on ecommerce web sites.

—Diacritical marks in languages like French and Portuguese, where they are added to indicate a dropped character but otherwise have no effect on the modern pronunciation of the word.

—The reel-to-reel tape machine icon used on cell phones to indicate a voice mail message.

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Got any skeuomorphs?