This is the title I chose for my personal blog, which is meant to give me an outlet for one of my favorite crafts – writing – plus to use an image from my favorite sport, golf.  Out of college, my first job was as a reporter for the Daily Astorian in Astoria, Oregon, and I went on from there to practice writing in all my professional positions, including as press secretary in Washington, D.C. for a Democrat Congressman from Oregon (Les AuCoin), as an Oregon state government manager in Salem and Portland, as press secretary for Oregon’s last Republican governor (Vic Atiyeh), and as a private sector lobbyist.  This blog also allows me to link another favorite pastime – politics and the art of developing public policy – to what I write.  I could have called this blog “Middle Ground,” for that is what I long for in both politics and golf.  The middle ground is often where the best public policy decisions lie.  And it is where you want to be on a golf course.

The Department of Words Matter is open again.  It is one of five departments I run.

Yes.  Five.

That’s because I am a management guru.

The others are the Department of Pet Peeves, the Department of Good Quotes Worth Remembering, the Department of “Just Saying,” and the Department of Inquiring Minds Want to Know.

So, from the Department of Words Matter.

Just think for a minute about words that have outlived their usefulness these days, but us oldsters still might use them when we make a mistake. 

Call them anachronisms.

Say what?

Here is what the word means:  “A thing belonging or appropriate to a period other than that in which it exists, especially a thing that is conspicuously old-fashioned.”

As noted in the headline for this blog, here’s an anachronism:  Phone booth.

With hand-held phones available to nearly everyone, phone booths are no longer necessary.  Kids these days probably don’t even know what they were, even as they might wonder what those small glass houses are broken up on the sides of some roads.

All this came to mind as I read a story in the Washington Post by Benjamin Dreyer, the former executive managing editor and copy chief at Random House, as well as the author of “Dreyer’s English:  An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style.”

He wrote under this headline:  “If you’re still using these dated words, you’re not alone.”

Dreyer imagines that some words are used “in an anachronistic way, by referring to something in a way that is appropriate only for a former time.”

He says anachronisms abound and provides some examples:

• Residents of New York City still speak of subway token booths, though it has been two decades since anyone saw a subway token, except perhaps at the bottom of a jar of change (or loose coins, also now rolling toward heirloom status).
• We cc people in emails, though carbon copies — made on a typewriter by inserting a carbon-coated sheet between two blank pages — are as dead as the IBM Selectric.
• We listen to podcasts, though who even owns an iPod anymore?
• Some of us, though our numbers are dwindling, still refer to “rolling down” car windows, “dialing” phone numbers and then “hanging up” when the call is over (on those rare occasions when two human beings actually speak on a phone).
• We say we’re “taping” a TV show on a DVR when no videotape is involved — then again, in the age of streaming, DVRs are following VCRs into oblivion.
• We used to use the term “floppy disk.”  The originals, in the 1970s, were made of Mylar and thus bendable, later replaced by harder, more rigid versions.  But everyone still called them floppy.  Today, they don’t much exist.

So, as I cite these issues in the Department of Words Matter, I also note that, in some cases, the very definitions of words have changed.

Just consider the word “gay.”  It used to mean happy.  You know what it means today…something else!

All I can say is that language appears to be alive and well.