Syntaxality!

I've seen an ad for the new Mortal Kombat game in which it says the game is "available digitally and in stores." We sometimes talk about digital downloads of movies, so it took second to remember that we're talking about a video game here. And that's when it hit me: available digitally and in stores. Does that mean that if I buy it in stores, I get an analog version?

Apparently they have decided that because the word "digitally" is applied to downloads, so the word will now be used to mean "downloaded with no physical copy." This, even though all copies of the game are, like all software today, digital.

It's sort of like how we in Canada refer to the electricity supply as "hydro" because we started with the term “hydroelectric” and generalized the wrong part of the word. Or it’s like “film” in reference to a feature-length movie. The word “film” originally meant the celluloid the movie was recorded on, but it is now used to refer to movies that go from studio to audience without using any film or tape.

In contrast, sound recorded on grooved vinyl was called a “record” because it was a recording. Yet somehow, we came to think of “record” as meaning the physical thing itself, so no one would call a collection of audio computer files as a “record,” even though it’s still a recording. I don’t know how society decides on these things. Why is this thing I’m writing called a “blog” and not a “glorified diary shoved in the public’s face”?