The rise of the retronym

‘Should I pay in actual money, in-person, in the shop itself?’ I asked my husband incredulously the other day. Yes, he replied, sounding rather bored. Prior to the pandemic such an exchange would not have taken place. I would have simply gone to the shop with no thought of government restrictions to my personal liberties, unmasked and care-free, and paid in good old-fashioned sovereigns. But this is 2021 and the pandemic has had such a profound effect on our linguistic habits that we are now forced to speak in a tangle of retronyms to get our point across.

But what exactly are retronyms? Those expecting the linguistic form of a Hoxton hipster, dressed ironically in 90s clothes may be disappointed because retronyms just aren’t that edgy. Rather, retronyms are the neologism’s poor cousin, words that need a modifier to accompany the noun to distinguish it from its new, flashier variant.