ON LANGUAGE; Sit on My Laptop
BY WILLIAM SAFIRE
Published: October 23, 1988
TIME WAS, THE SEX-ist male boss dreamed of inveigling his female secretary to sit on his lap. Today, male and female executives dream of using their laps as launching pads for brainy little machines called >laptops.
Wait - how can a lap have a top? A lap is already a top - a seated person's thightops - which can be more laboriously defined as ''the horizontal area from knees to waist formed in the sitting position by a lascivious boss of either sex.'' (The word is rooted in the Latin >labi, ''to slide,'' and if you have ever had anyone slide off your lap as you rose, surprised by an unwelcome office boy, you can imagine how some embarrassed Roman senator might have coined the term.) But whence >laptop? We cannot say ''in the laptops of luxury'' or ''in the laptops of the gods'' or even ''sit on my laptop, dearie'' -it sounds silly.
This new word is on everyone's lips, and has even made it into the new unabridged Random House II Dictionary, because as an adjective or attributive noun modifying >computer, it gives us ''a computer small enough to be rested on the user's lap,'' presumably when the user is traveling and no desk is available.
The desk is the clue to the formation of >laptop. The earlier word was >desktop, which was coined on the analogy of >tabletop by Dashiell Hammett in 1929: ''He . . . returned his feet to the desk-top.'' Other mystery writers, such as Rex Stout, picked up the word (it was a favorite area for activity by private eyes), and it was adopted in the late 1960's to describe computers then on the drawing boards that could be used in homes as well as offices. Today, it describes computers that are not as portable as laptops and is gaining frequency in the phrase >desktop publishing.
As computers proliferated on the tops of desks, the smaller size reached for an extension of the analogy. The first citation in Nexis, the computerized clip service, comes from 1984: David Winer, the founder of a computer software firm, Living Videotext Inc., and his brother Peter, used the word >laptop in Byte magazine. Reached at his headquarters in Palo Alto, Calif., David Winer said, ''I wish I could say I coined the word >laptop, but I didn't. It was already in common use in the industry. We tried various plays on the term, including >floortop, beachtop and >bedtop.''
Because >desktop had already lost its hyphen, >laptop was born without a hyphen; both words are now more often used adjectivally, but the phrase >laptop computer is dropping the final word, and >laptop will probably soon most often be used in its noun form: ''I'm working on my 20-megahertz >laptop with its 40-megabyte hard disk, General, which is why it is not advisable for me to stand and salute.''
We should not be surprised by the appearance of >laptop; the idea of a working surface on the lap dates back to 1804 with >lapboard. The current combination has the added advantage of consonance, which is the technique of repeating a consonant sound -such as the m as in time frame, or dim sum, or, in this case, the final >p of >lap and >top. (Alliteration deals only with the beginnings of words; consonance deals usually with the middles and endings. Only the most subtle speechwriters try the latter.) A dependent of my acquaintance recently submitted a list of expenses including one item spelled ''underware.'' I was about to chastise her for this apparent misspelling, but now it occurs to me - could this be what fashionable hackers wear beneath their >laptops?
Just the Fax, Ma'am ''YOU GOT A >FAX?'' ''Uh-huh.'' ''What's your >fax number?''
You mumble a telephone number. ''O.K., I'll >fax it to you.'' In this brief modern conversation, you have heard the word >fax used as noun, adjective and verb.
Thomas Fuller, the 17th-century theologian, would have been thrilled. It was he who first used >facsimile, in ''The History of the Worthies of England,'' applying the Latin phrase to the sort of writer we all know: ''He, though a quick Scribe, is but a dull one, who is good only at >fac simile, to transcribe out of an original.''
The Latin meant ''make similar,'' and since 1815, the compressed phrase has meant ''exact copy from transmission.'' Scientific American in 1935 wrote that ''The home radio set will produce a copy of the printed material that was fed into the broadcasting machine, with picture and text reproduced in >facsimile.'' The New Yorker in 1948 defined facsimile newspaper as one that ''travels through the air.''
Although the news carrier who flips your newspaper irretrievably into the boxwood has not yet been replaced by an electronic signal, today >fax is surely on the make. >Telefacsimile, which appeared in 1952, is the system of sending and reproducing written material via telephone lines and, on the analogy of >telex, was shortened to >telefax and then to the simple >fax. The Economist in 1976 defined >facsimile transmission (fax) as ''a hybrid between telex and photocopying.''