I was listening to NPR and they played an interview with a futballer who answered a question misunderstanding vampire for umpire. After he realized the mistake he laughed and said please delete that.   And it struck me, 10 years ago, we would said erase.  I’m pretty sure whatever device they were using for the interview was a digital recording device and thus, yes you would say delete instead of erase.  However, back in the day, when we used tape, we would say erase.  This was pretty common expression really.  Erase a tape, erase a mark on paper, erase ones memory, erase from history, etc…    However, I’m hearing delete more and more often. Delete from the record, deleted from the scene, etc..  I do not expect it to take too long for delete to be the common expression to remove evidence of something just as erase has been for so long.  Lets remember the work ‘erase’ has been around since the 1600’s, according to dictionary.com at least, so I do not expect we will replace ‘erase’ with ‘delete’ all that quickly, but its already happening, and I expect the adoption of ‘delete’ over ‘erase’ to accelerate and more generations grow up in the digital age.

That’s my random thought of the day.