A 67 year old lady at my job keeps calling the binder we share a tablet and every time she asks for it, I’m like, “what tablet?”. Yesterday I told her it’s a binder and she said it was called a tablet before my time. But all my grandparents are around the same age and they all call them binders. Was it a regional thing maybe? We’re in the US by the way.
A tablet is a pad of paper that’s glued on one edge. You can flip the sheets or tear them out. The full name for a binder is a “loose leaf binder”. Because it’s designed to bind…loose sheets!
No. Tablets come with paper included. Binders, you need to provide your own paper.
It’s very likely SHE called it that, or her parents, but they’ve always been wrong.
[off topic]
We were in a class talking about X-rays. One young woman kept insisting that ‘opaque’ was a color. We finally figured out that she had seen opaque pantyhose and been confused.
Tablets are notebooks that the paper flips vertically over the top instead of folding to the left or right
It isn’t a universal thing, but yeah.
As others have said, a tablet typically refers to a prebound pad of paper, and most typically to one that is bound across the top, ala legal pads.
Like anything language related, usages bleed and shift. Back before bound paper was a thing, it was used to refer to any flat writing surface.
It goes back to tabula, from Latin, where the primary (but not only!) use was for the equivalent of a placard or other inscribed label, as well as any writing surface.
Think like a writing slate. The term tabula rasa is essentially the same as “clean slate”, and refers to writing on an actual slate being erased.
So, tablet over time has been used for pretty much any writing surface at all, and it’s not unusual to see it applied to any bound writing surface, even if it’s a loose-leaf binder. It is archaic though, and wasn’t exactly common in that specific usage (not that I’ve ever heard or seen anyway). But I have seen and heard it used that way, particularly for the kind of binders that run across an entire edge of a stack of papers, like you might use for a presentation. For ringed binders, I’ve only heard it used a handful of times, and never seen it in print.
Caveat: I’m just a word nerd, so I’ve never tracked things down to primary sources. Etymology is a fairly rigorous thing, and nothing I’ve said here is exactly rigorous. Take it as a casual thing pulled from memory rather than something you could cite in a class assignment.
A tablet is more like a clipboard with paper than a binder 📋
If you think of a stone tablet, it’s a flat thing with writing on it, same idea.
I’ve heard it used to refer to Notebooks but only by much older people (and I’m already middle-aged myself). I’ve never heard a binder called that. But, the linked article does mention spiral-bound notebooks, so I wonder if that’s why she conflated it in her mind.
Binder as in the thing that holds papers?
Yeah, we use an empty binder as a door stopper.
With no paper involved, “tablet” makes even less sense. I’m quite old, it’s not an age thing.
Given how you’re using it, you could further confuse her by calling it a “chock.”
Gotcha. Well, I’ve never heard it called a tablet around where I live, so that’s a new thing for me. To me a tablet is flat and most binders (three ring binders) have a sort of triangular profile so I would have been confused too lol
Maybe it was a joke that someone used back when she started the job 50 years ago. I could see it being a metaphor for something like the stone tablets that ancient texts were written on…or if she started more recently than that (or the company adopted computers by then), it could refer to information that wasn’t digital.
