buggy whip
nounEtymology
In the twentieth century, after the advent of widespread automobile use and diminished horse use, the buggy whip became a symbol of obsoleted technologies and disrupted business models. Popularized by German-American economist and professor at Harvard Business School Theodore Levitt in 1960.
Definitions
A horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash, used for driving a horse…
A horsewhip with a long stiff shaft and a relatively short lash, used for driving a horse harnessed to a buggy or other small open carriage.
- When his strawberries were beginning to ripen Dry Valley bought the heaviest buggy whip in the Santa Rosa store. He sat for many hours under the live oak tree plaiting and weaving in an extension to its lash.
- Rushed to the springboard and the leap, always, after the take-off, in mid-air, they had to encounter an assistant who stood underneath, an extraordinarily long buggy-whip in hand, and lashed them vigorously.
An obsolete product or technology.
- went the way of the buggy whip
- Need to describe a hand-held mathematical calculator? Try “buggy whip.” A typewriter? A VCR? They’ve been called buggy whips, too. Even newspapers have received that label. (That one hurts.)
- “We're sort of the last guy standing on pay phones,” [Thomas] Keane told USA Today. “I call it my buggy-whip strategy. I'm sure somebody somewhere is happily making buggy whips at some level.
The neighborhood
Vish — recursive loop
No curated loop yet for buggy whip. Loops are being traced one word at a time while the ingestion pipeline matures.
sense glosses and etymology drawn from English Wiktionary · source · CC-BY-SA