The submit button. We come across it every day. Yesterday I was doing a revamp on some of the pages on my business website and I came to the submit button. And stopped. And thought about it…
Its a weird word – Submit. Here’s the directory definition (screenshot of my iPhone Dictionary App):
So by clicking a submit button are you surrendering? Submissively surrendering your info?
But how does this gel with the other sense of “submission” – like when you confidently submit a proposal?
Its not a pun in the usual sense of wordplay as in, say, the word “bill” (bill of a bird, bill at a restaurant). No, it seems that somewhere along the line the word shared a common root. Maybe something along the lines of “hand over”. And then the word split into a confident handover versus a fearful handover.
Whatever. The most interesting part of it for me is that we use words like this so often, we don’t even realise what they mean any more…
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