The other day, in an aside, I found it anachronistic that WordPress still has us “publish” posts. But Brendan Greeley of Open Source Radio emailed this bit of research:
Hey, I just checked the derivation, because I was curious. “Publish” is from “publicare,” roughly, “to make public.” That is, it doesn’t have anything to do with paper at all. This isn’t just to nitpick, it’s to make the point that what we traditionally understand as “publisher” — someone who pays for paper to be printed — is only an accident. The verb isn’t anachronistic; what it came to mean is.
I’ll now hit “publish” with revolutionary pride.
