| Comment | 10 years ago the answer to this would've been yes, absolutely in the same room, across a table from each other. In this age of teleconferencing, it does make you think for a few seconds before answering.
But only for a few seconds. Even with teleconferencing, anyone using "face to face" in English who meant "seeing someone on a TV monitor" would just be begging to be misunderstood. They would surely have to say, "I video [tele-] conferenced with X this morning...".
So, I think the original meaning is safe--for a while. Children are now riding 2-wheelers who never saw a world without teleconferencing. When they get into the job market, "face to face" may well change its meaning.
If it does, it may run on a parallel track with the word "mail" which has changed its meaning (AE) in the last 10 years or so. It used to be that "mail" meant only one thing. Now there's FedEx and "e-mail", and in the circles I'm in, the default "mail" is now electronic. If you mean the old kind, with paper, you have to qualify it: "regular mail", "snail mail", "sent him a letter" and so on. If you just say "mail", it's e-mail.
In 10 years from now "face to face" might mean "videoconference" for those grown-up kids. To specify the "old-fashioned" kind, they may have to say "live face-to-faces", or "personals", or "actual meetings" or who knows what. Stay tuned, and ask Kili to reactivate this thread in 2013... |
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