'Cassette Tape' fades out of Oxford Dictionary

As newer, more modern words such as "sexting," "retweet" and "cyberbullying" became part of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (COED) last week, some older, lesser known words had to be taken out to make room for the new ones. Some of these words include "brabble" (a paltry, noisy quarrel) and "growlery" (a private room or a den), but a word of fairly recent memory has also been given a one-way trip to the Oxford chopping board: the cassette tape. To the uninitiated, a cassette tape consists of a long magnetic tape strip wound up in two miniature spools, and is used for sound recording and playing back in the early '70s to the late '90s. The cassette tape pre-dates the compact disc (CD) and the MP3 player in terms of how songs are distributed to millions of music aficionados around the globe. The COED inconspicuously removed the beloved word from its roster last week, not even offering a eulogy to dignify its exit from the lexicon. This apparently angered Bucks Burnett, owner of Eight Track Museum (a shrine dedicated to similar defunct formats), who moved to ban the dictionary from his museum, the Huffington Post reports. ""Mankini?" he said with disgust. "That settles it! I'm going to ban the Oxford Dictionary from the museum. I have a copy and I'm going to recycle it!" "See if they still have the moon listed in the dictionary. I bet they do. Nobody uses the damn moon anymore, not even NASA," he angrily added. Burnett pointed out that even if a great part of the music industry has since moved on from the cassette tape, some musicians still produce them, "albeit the market is small." "There are numerous stories everywhere the past year about lots of indie bands putting out cassette-only albums with fantastic design," he stressed. The US' National Public Radio reported last year that a company called Patient Sounds managed by 23-year-old Matthew Sage is one such tape-focused label. Sage said he decided to focus on cassette tapes because they "have a tangible aesthetic appeal." "The tape is more an art object that also plays music (similar to vinyl) where the CDR is more a vessel for a piece of music." The NPR noted, however, that 2009 was "the worst year for cassette sales since 2009," suggesting that its use and appeal is slowly on the way out. — TJD, GMA News