Re: Auto Wastebasket purging based on date?
The word "wastebasket" is unknown in written English before the British-English version of the Macintosh system. It was coined by someone in Apple's Engineering department because the proper translation, "wastepaper basket", was too long to fit on the icon label.
"Bin", the direct translation of "Trash[can]", may have been ruled out because of the word's meaning as an abbreviation of "binary", or maybe it just looked too short on-screen.
Translating this wasn't exactly Apple's finest hour, and there's a certain fascination with wickerwork running through these. German used "Papierkorb", which, while at least being a real German word, was one that didn't universally mean "trashcan" - I have heard more than one German use the word to refer to an in-tray (literally it means a "basket for papers"). The French translation, "corbeille", gave up on the concept of paper altogether, and so simply meant a basket of any kind, including one you'd use for fruit or flowers.
However, I'm deliberately using the past-tense for all these, because over the three decades, the repeated use of these translations in computer interfaces has retroactively given them the originally-intended meaning. "Wrong" words become "right" words once they're understood by enough people...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
