Stop Being Broken tips for living in the near future — more…

Desktop Wallpaper

Explaining the odd misnomer “desktop wallpaper” and suggesting a change for the future.

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Indeed. Very interesting for techno-philologists like myself. I hope you’ve got a backlog of content to cover. This is going to be fun.

Off to change my desktop picture now.

I’ve always preferred Apple’s term, “desktop background.” Pretty much the same thing.

Fantastic concept for a show!

I heartily disagree with renaming desktop wallpaper to desktop picture. While yes it makes total sense, the name has already been decided and used for a decade. You don’t change a standard for the sake of change. Renaming the desktop wallpaper to desktop picture serves no grander purpose than to change up the lingo. Do the people out there that don’t understand what Desktop Wallpaper out number the people that do?

Please keep publishing this show. It is an awesome idea and I look forward to viewing future episodes.

I’m with Jared. I like “desktop background”.

Cool idea for a site, and I enjoyed the snarky comments, like about tiling my bathroom and listening to the wireless.

This show made me think about how the airlines renamed the “cockpit” to the “flight deck.”

I concur, total misnomer. For your next segment you should survey the number of people that actually contain gloves in their “glove box”. I suspect very few.

Perhaps we should rename “glove box” to “storage compartment”.

Not a sermon, just a thought.

I want to contribute something witty and clever, but I keep deleting everything I come up with. Maybe it’s because I haven’t slept in four days. I’m okay with giving up “wallpaper.” Maybe I’ll do it for Lent. Oh, there you go.

It really is just Windows people who speak of wallpaper. Back in the day, Mac users had Desktop Patterns, before they became Desktop Backgrounds. Only Microsoft would think it meet to so mangle a metaphor as to put wallpaper on top of a desk surface.

i like calling radios wirelesses
also: THE WHOLE OF COMPUTING IS BASED ON BAD METAPHORS
files, folders, the desktop, the recycle bin, etc.
a lot of programs are named after real-world equivalents as well
even the word computer is a metaphor