Vacuum cleaner ranks high among my favorite misnomers. First, its name suggests it's a device to clean the vacuum. Vacuum is a total absence of anything, it's literally emptiness. So there's no dirt in it, by definition.
This being English, you never know how does a pair of words function. Horse cart is drawn by horses, but milk cart is not drawn by milk - it's used to transport milk. I wonder what would be a cart to transport horses be called... anyway, maybe the vacuum cleaner is supposed to be something that uses vacuum to clean stuff? But it doesn't. On the contrary, it uses air. Which is, specially for those among us who have the habit of breathing, entirely different from vacuum.
OK, it operates on underpressure. But that's still very much not vacuum. And yet the sellers have come up with this name, and hoisted it upon the general English speaking public for a bit of eternity. Don't know what they were thinking - to impress the buyers with a bit of Latin, and with a bit of willful ignorance? It's just as preposterous as calling a pogo stick an antigravitational device, but they did it, and got away with it. The only other such thing I can recall is the "stainless steel", which I've seen stained many times; its main feature, that it doesn't rust, is omitted. We call it "nerđajući čelik" (нерђајући челик) - non-rusting steel.
I've checked a dozen other languages. In any of them (that I could guess the roots of the words) it's an "aspirator", "sucker", "puller" - with "dust" or "stuff" added as a prefix or suffix. Serbian (Croatian et al) proudly created a new word for it, "usisivač" - literally, insucker.
This being English, you never know how does a pair of words function. Horse cart is drawn by horses, but milk cart is not drawn by milk - it's used to transport milk. I wonder what would be a cart to transport horses be called... anyway, maybe the vacuum cleaner is supposed to be something that uses vacuum to clean stuff? But it doesn't. On the contrary, it uses air. Which is, specially for those among us who have the habit of breathing, entirely different from vacuum.
OK, it operates on underpressure. But that's still very much not vacuum. And yet the sellers have come up with this name, and hoisted it upon the general English speaking public for a bit of eternity. Don't know what they were thinking - to impress the buyers with a bit of Latin, and with a bit of willful ignorance? It's just as preposterous as calling a pogo stick an antigravitational device, but they did it, and got away with it. The only other such thing I can recall is the "stainless steel", which I've seen stained many times; its main feature, that it doesn't rust, is omitted. We call it "nerđajući čelik" (нерђајући челик) - non-rusting steel.
I've checked a dozen other languages. In any of them (that I could guess the roots of the words) it's an "aspirator", "sucker", "puller" - with "dust" or "stuff" added as a prefix or suffix. Serbian (Croatian et al) proudly created a new word for it, "usisivač" - literally, insucker.
2 back and forths:
I like your horse-cart milk-cart quandary, and yes American English--especially where it concerns commercial and political interests--is often a product of contorted erroneous and sometimes outright ambiguous meanings. But, I don't see a problem with the term "vacuum cleaner".
The word "vacuum" points to a set of meanings both theoretical, applied, abstract and metaphorical. Selecting one from this set of meanings is a matter of context both implied and inferred. Upon demonstration it becomes readily apparent perhaps the device should be called a "manifold vacuum cleaner", but even so the name of the device need not be a comprehensive mechanical description of what it does, else speech would become rather unwieldy.
Sure you could just as well call it a "suction cleaner", but that is simply a matter of preference. I mean, how is that suction created? Ahh see the answer takes us back to the world of absolute and partial vacuum principles anyway. We could also call it a "depressurization cleaner", a "differential density cleaner", and "airborne particle displacer"...or something arbitrary like "superbroom" which would, over time, assume the identity of this mysterious device that makes dirt get off the floor with more force and authority than an ordinary broom and dustpan...haha this can all get rather silly, and quickly too.
I mean...holy cow!!...what about the purest definition of "clean"? Must we attack clutter and dirt at the subatomic level, resulting in some sort of quantum obliteration before we can call a surface clean, or can be simply transport the stuff on that surface from where we don't want it to where we want it using something properly approximated as a "vacuum cleaner"?
Cheers :)
The word "vacuum" points to a set of meanings
Not to me. Vacuum is emptiness, no more, no less. No gases at all, pressure zero. Look up the definition in any book on physics.
This machine does not create vacuum, does not use it. It uses a stream of air, with pressure different from the surrounding air (generally lower, but I learned of some which used compressed air).
I'm a bit sensitive when it comes to using scientific terms in unscientific context, specially when this context subverts the meaning.
The irony of it is that if there was some dirt out in the vacuum of the interstellar space, these cleaners would be unable to clean it. It's not that they just don't really use vacuum, they can't use it.
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