Insourcing and dumb bombs

 This post is very much for the lexicographers of my acquaintance, but I'm sure everyone else will see how it all works too, and will maybe think of their own examples.

Can you remember what we used to call terrestrial TV before satellite TV was invented? Yes, we used to just call it TV.

And we only needed to start calling it terrestrial TV when we needed to distinguish it from the TV up in the sky. There should be a name for this phenomenon, and possibly a grammarian or semantic engineer has produced one, but I am going to call it the 'Dumb bomb process' or DBP 

When in one of the Gulf Wars we were told that these really cool new ways of killing people had been introduced and we should call them 'Smart bombs', I'm sure a lot of the armchair warriors found great joy in watching videos of bombs going through the front doors of mudbrick houses. Quite a techno-gap between participants, but a new age and a new weapon and a new word. So we were told that 'smart bombs' had been used in x district or x building had been destroyed by smart bombs. 

But this of course left a semantic gap, because now there were two kinds of bombs, smart bombs and the other kind, and because of course smart bombs were themselves a kind of bomb, you couldn't just call a not-smart bomb 'a bomb'. So to make the distinction clear, when we are talking about falling munitions we do have to allow for the word 'dumb bomb'. It's not that popular but it is necessary. 

Another example I heard recently was 'insourcing' when an organisation wanted to reverse the 'outsourcing' that they had already done. It is not quite a DBP, but it is an example of a word that is only needed when a brand new antonymic neologism appears (which means, as the lexicographers will understand, a new-coined word that is the opposite in meaning of the one we are studying. So if you start outsourcing, the possibility of a later insourcing also becomes possible. 

There are other examples I have noticed. There has been what I take to be a fairly recent neologism in the use of the verb 'to platform'. I cannot be sure that this did not exist in earlier decades but it has only become very common since the idea of 'no-platforming' emerged. As you will know, this is the idea of stopping someone speaking in a particular place (usually a university) because some people (often, but not always, students) disagree with the views of the speaker and think that the speaker should be 'no-platformed' and not allowed to speak in said institution. 

Therefore if you have the idea of no-platforming and an institution refuses to no-platform someone, they may now be accused of 'platforming' them, as in "How dare you platform X, who does so much harm to Y by her speech and by her ideas!"

This whole linguistic process really brings out the semantic Attenborough in me, hiding behind the bushes spying the neologisms as they emerge from the inevitability of communication. I love how natural and energetic the development of living language is, and I have no problem at all with these new words, especially if they really hit the spot meaning-wise. 

If you have examples of your own, I would love to hear more that you have spotted.