Frictionless.

Nitsuh Abebe’s latest “On Language” column (archived; see this post) is on the word frictionless, which is not particularly interesting in and of itself; I was skimming along: “Frictionless” used to be an intensely physical word: It first thrived in the late 1880s, when the engineers of the Second Industrial Revolution were scrambling for new lubricants, bearing designs and low-friction alloys to keep factory machines from grinding themselves to bits. Today’s use, though, comes from computing, in which “friction” is anything that stands between a user and the completion of a task — whether it’s learning complicated system architecture or having to click a single additional “OK” button to order shoes. Removing those obstacles was, for a while, the tech world’s grand selling point. …when I got to this: These complaints [about “the dream of a frictionless existence”], funnily enough, echo the oldest use of “frictionless” cited in the Oxford English Dictionary — from an 1848 satirical…