Who knew that the arguments I used to have with newspaper copy editors, if written down and fleshed out a bit, could have landed me in the pages of the New York Times? OK, it probably would have taken more than that, but John Rosenthal's meditation on the word "record" as in "record album," hits many of the same points I once made when butting heads with those editing my CD reviews. I would refer to any collection of music as a "record" or an "album," when they were expecting to see "CD" throughout. I used those other terms for variety's sake, of course, but also because they are accurate. A record is simply a recording, whether it is reproduced on a piece of vinyl, a cassette, a CD or even an 8-track or reel-to-reel. An album, in its purest sense, is a collection of things; you have a photo album, I have a record album.

The term is seen by most as synonymous with vinyl, so when they hear "record" they think "outdated piece of black plastic." The problem is that terminology hasn't kept up with technology. Or rather, the terms have changed, but the catch-all words like "record" were applied to the same thing for so long that they came to mean only that one thing. In those arguments with copy editors I would usually back down because the thought of arguing about such a thing made my head hurt. I would sprinkle my copy with enough "CDs" to make them happy and then move on. Rosenthal ran into his disagreement at a stranger place: Tower Records. It's one thing for a teenaged clerk who was born after CDs became the gold standard (But before mp3 trading seemed to make even this relative newcomer seem obsolete) to argue semantics, but wouldn't a store with the word "records" in its name perhaps train its staff a bit better?