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Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

I have to ask. Why is it "white"-board vs. "chalk"-board? Back in elementary school, I learned to call the former "black"-board.

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To me at least, the different types are easy to understand.

White-board - the color of the board is white, it is used for dry erase markers.

Black-board - the color of the board is black, it is used with chalk.

Chalk-board - the color of the board doesn't matter, it likely uses chalk to write with and is therefore a "blackboard" as well.

Chalkboards are green, it just happens that the name also encompasses blackboards.

Regional variation? When I was growing up (in California, in the 1970s and 80s), we called them chalkboards because, you know, you used chalk to write on them. Also, they were often green.

Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'?

> Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'?

'coke'

'Obesity juice'

"Fat-free"

> Do you call it 'soda' or 'pop'?

Soft drink

"Soda pop" is also a valid answer.

Or "tonic" (which was already a somewhat archaic term for soda generally in the Boston area when I was going to school). Boston had a number of those. Frappe was another--which you still see now and then at old-timey ice cream places. (A "milk shake" was just flavored milk.)

"pop" where I grew up in the midwest, but now that I'm in/near Atlanta, it's mostly "coke" regardless of variety.

I was born in the 70s, raised in Oregon, and we called them chalkboards. "Blackboard" sounded old-timey to me, like something you'd hear on Little House on the Prairie. A Google search result points out that green became a common color for chalkboards, and in retrospect I think most of mine in school were green.

More googling says that the original blackboards were slate. The green ones were porcelain.

Our green ones varied in quality and material. Most of them seemed to have some cheap coating that was sometimes torn by chalk; after being torn, the edges of green coating seemed stretched like thin plastic. Some of the green ones, the teachers actually liked. Maybe those were porcelain?

Also had blackboards at some of my schools. They seem to last forever without much care.

Not an explantion, but I do remember when they first arrived (there was one the year I began high school -- new physics teacher got to set it up how he wanted) and no new ones when I left. I also saw then appear at MIT, again, mainly new construction/renovation.

Chalk boards came in black or green. That name is lost in history, to me. Whiteboards were kind of a shock by comparison -- bright rather than dark -- so it did seem natural. "Marker board" sounds funny now, though it makes sense ("not chalk") but I suppose had it caught on it would be normal. I've only seen "dry erase" used on packages so I assume it's a branding issue.

While the one at my HS was the first one I'd seen (and, seemingly the first any of my classmates had seen, as it was a minor topic of dicussion) I think we'd at least heard of them. This was 1978.

"dry erase" means the ink comes off even when dry, as opposed to a permanent marker.

Also, after a long time, even dry erase needs toothpaste to come off.

I've never heard of using toothpaste, but one can take off old dry erase or even permanent marker by going over it with fresh dry erase, then erasing normally.

A good hint, but toothpaste is awesome.

Not only does it keep the cavity creeps away, it also can remove stains in wood finishing.

I once had a bottle of alcohol spill a little, and it discoloured the wood table stain. Toothpaste fixed it.

And the room smelled minty after, too!

> Back in elementary school, I learned to call the former "black"-board.

Same here. It’s still called black board in my part of the world, I think.

In português it's "quadro branco" (a white board/rectangle/frame on the wall or on a stand) and "lousa" (which refers to the material and/or its colour and texture). I think "chalkboards" and "lousa" can be black, grey, blue, brown, purple, red, or green, but maybe "blackboard" can only be black.

"Lousa" is more of a PT_pt thing. In PT_br, "quadro negro" was more usual, but most of them were painted dark green, go figure!

In Spanish we call a blackboard a "pizarrón", which references the slate its made of.

Because many chalkboards are a greenish color instead. Even slates are often more dark greyish than black.

In the UK they still call them "blackboards", I've never seen a green one over here.

Yup, as an Aussie my understanding is that UK English would call it a blackboard whereas US English would call it a chalkboard. AU English therefore followed the UK, regardless of if they're the dark angels-esque green or fully black colour.

I've pretty much always heard it as blackboard in the US though I wouldn't do a double-take if someone called it a chalkboard. I'm pretty sure I've seen green variants but not at all commonly.

I prefer dark-mode and light-mode.

Ronald Susskind uses a white board and calls it a black board

Ronald!? Leonard... now I can't edit it and forever I will look like an idiot.

Just tell people it's his muddle name.

I've never heard 'chalkboard' before fwiw.

Because some chalk boards are green

Isn't it the same like whitelist and blacklist ?

Hypersensitivity to the word "black".

Comments about "chalkboard" being more accurate should only be accepted if the proponent also uses "penboard".

I think you are projecting your own hypersensitivity into your understanding of the topic.

Green chalkboards, like my schools had as a kid, were not black.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blackboard points out "Green porcelain enamel surface, was first used in 1930, and as this type of boards became popular, the word "chalkboard" appeared. In the US green porcelain enamelled boards started to appear at schools in 1950s."

To double-check, see the Google Ngram comparison at https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=blackboard%2Cc...

The use of "chalkboard" doesn't really exist before the 1940s, and increases rapidly in the 1950s, reaching the current rate (of about 50% of the usage of "blackboard") in the the 1960s.

Blackboards are not black, they are grey; robin red-breasts do not have red breasts, those are orange; Redheads do not have red hair, they have orange-brown, and so on. So why is it that black is renamed on the grounds of accuracy?

> I think you are projecting your own hypersensitivity

I'm puzzled by this, could you elucidate? I'm with James Brown "Say It Loud – I'm Black and I'm Proud", I don't see black as a negative, so I don't see why the word should be avoided.

> Blackboards are not black, they are grey

Yes, and tennis shoes aren't only used for tennis.

What you wrote is not correct. First, I assume you are not making the technically-correct-only assertion that since everything, including Vantablack, reflects some light, it isn't truly black but only a dark shade of grey.

Quoting Wikipedia, "Blackboards were originally made of smooth, thin sheets of black or dark grey slate stone". That's "black" and "dark grey".

But you don't need to take Wikipedia's work. We can look at books from a century ago and read a book where they improvised a blackboard using black paint: "This space was carefully sandpapered and immediately after received its first coat of black paint, prepared with oil, which served as a foundation. After 24 hours, another layer of the black color followed, (this time without oil) and finally, in two more days, the black brush completed, from every standpoint, a perfect blackboard." https://archive.org/details/jstor-3406078/page/n1/mode/2up?q...

Or the 1905 book "Nelson's blackboard drawing" which mentions "So long as the black surface of the board is visible, the sketch is quite conventional" at https://archive.org/details/b1625318/page/n121/mode/2up?q=bl... . (As an aside, there are some excellent chalk drawings in that book.)

Thus, black surfaces for chalk use in a classroom have long been referred to as "blackboards."

You can see the transition to "chalkboard" in the 1950s (emphasis mine in the following) in a 1955 publication saying "And don’t overlook the old standby, the chalkboard. Notice that we refer to it as a chalkboard, since it is not black. A green board and yellow chalk will not produce the halo effect that results from using white chalk on a blackboard. You can make a simple and inexpensive chalkboard by painting the smooth side of a piece of tempered masonite with green chalkboard paint." https://archive.org/details/CAT10679308/page/2/mode/2up?q=ch...

As well as in this 1953 newspaper article titled "Britain Bans Old-Fashioned Blackboard For The New Colored Chalkboard", wherein we read how "a slab of black on the wall has a tendency to create a dark, depressing, uncomfortable and gloomy atmosphere", and how they will be replaced "with a 'chalkboard' in some one of nine brighter colors" https://archive.org/details/1953-04-11-1953-04-30/page/n167/... .

The trend continues, like this 1962 comment that "The chalkboard (blackboard) is one of the oldest graphic or visual instruction devices. The earlier slate blackboard has now been replaced by white, green, or yellow satin-surfaced or glareproof glass or plastic chalk-board." at https://archive.org/details/audiovisualmater0000unse/page/66...

By the 1970s you can see Sears referring to an "old-fashioned blackboard" as a "black chalkboard" at https://archive.org/details/1970-1979-sears-wishbook-toys_20... and at the bottom of the page is a flip chalkboard with described as blue on one side and black on the other.

> So why is it that black is renamed on the grounds of accuracy?

As they said in the 1950s, "we refer to it as a chalkboard, since it is not black."

While your "hypersensitivity" hypothesis doesn't explain why the changing usage started in the pre-Civil Rights era of the 1950s, and including the UK.

> could you elucidate

I think you are hypersensitive to the idea that others are hypersensitive to using the term black.

I think you are so hypersensitive that you dismissed counter-evidence out of hand, without further examination.

You could be right, but using your favourite n-gram viewer, it looks like there is a relationship

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28chalkboard+...

Any thoughts on that apparent correlation? My (implicit) assertion was: in times of racial tension, people avoid(ed) using the word 'black' not wanting to appear racist. That seems reasonable to me, could there be some causal relation in the other direction?

There's an old phrase: "Correlation is not causation."

"TV" to "civil rights" - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=TV%2C%28civil+...

"Plastic" to "civil rights" - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=plastic%2C%28c...

"Pakistan" to "civil right" - https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%28Pakistan%29...

The site https://tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations shows a lot of spurious correlations.

What I did instead was present a claim (Wikipedia links to https://books.google.com/books?id=sl5GAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT45 and also describes the technology that made colored chalkboards popular), then double-checked that Ngram was consistent with the claim.

> That seems reasonable to me

Yes, that's because your hypersensitivity is kicking in.

It's causing you to reject the actual reasons given at the time in favor of your pet theory.

I've presented two direct quotes from the 1950s saying the reason for switching to "chalkboard" is because the new boards were not black.

You instead prefer to think these sources were hiding the truth, apparently in order to cover up hypersensitivty to the word "black".

Another problem with your pet theory is that in the 1950s black people were generally referred to as "colored" or "Negro". "Black" didn't start replacing "Negro" until the 1960s. Your James Brown citation is from the late 1960s, for example.

Your belief is that large numbers of people in the 1950s were so hypersensitive to the word "black", because someday in the future it might be used to refer to colored people, that they switched from "blackboard" to "chalkboard"?

While at the same time large numbers of people enforced racial segregation and discrimination.

Your pet theory would need a LOT of historical supporting evidence to hold any water. So, where's your evidence?

    I've presented two direct quotes from the 1950s saying the reason for
    switching to "chalkboard" is because the new boards were not black.

There's an old saying: "One swallow does not make a summer". It means that one should be careful extrapolating from slight evidence.

So how does your pet theory handle that the same phenomenon, a shift from blackboard to chalkboard, also happened in the UK (which also had a period of co-incident racial tension, albeit not as extreme as in the US) while, as others have mentioned, green blackboards are rare?

My point was to demonstrate that your "hypersensitivity" hypothesis has no evidentiary basis, and in fact runs counter to easily available evidence.

I believe I have done that, in way that other HN readers can easily verify for themselves.

Had you researched the topic yourself you would find more supporting evidence for my pet theory. I only presented a sampling of what I found, to keep my comment from being a wall of text.

Your saying doesn't even apply to you as you have not presented any evidence, not even a single feather.

As you don't seem to care, my interest here is done.

I don't know, I remember people talking about calling them chalkboards instead of blackboards in the UK 25 years ago, back when it was "political correctness gone mad". We don't have green chalkboards at all in the UK. They're all black.

In researching a sibling comment, I found a 1953 newspaper article saying "Britain Bans Old-Fashioned Blackboard For The New Colored Chalkboard" at https://archive.org/details/1953-04-11-1953-04-30/page/n167/... .

The reason given is "a slab of black on the wall has a tendency to create a dark, depressing, uncomfortable and gloomy atmosphere", and they will be replaced "with a 'chalkboard' in some one of nine brighter colors"

Amusingly, the Collins English Dictionary (3rd edition) defined "chalkboard" as "a U.S. and Canadian word for blackboard." at https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780004332864/page/268/mode... . Archive.org says it's from 1981 but I can't find a date in the book.

And in "An Assembly Collection" by Joan Hasler, Headteacher at Dover Grammar School for Girls, (1986) is reading 128, titled "Green Blackboards"

  The school is up-to-date.
  Proudly, the principal tells of all the improvements.
  The finest discovery, Lord, is the green blackboard.
  The scientists have studied long, they have made experiments;
  We know now that green is the ideal colour, that it doesn't tire the
    eyes, that it is quieting and relaxing.
   ....

I also found mention of a "green blackboard" in Comedians, a 1975 play by Trevor Griffiths taking place in 1970s Manchester (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comedians_(play) ): "his room, on the ground floor, is smallish, about a dozen chipped and fraying desks, two dozen chairs set out in rows facing the small dais on which stands the teacher’s desk, with green blackboard unwiped from the day’s last stand beyond." - https://archive.org/details/comedians0000grif_p3e8/page/6/mo... .

So it appears at some point there were at least green blackboards in the UK.

I've seen green blackboards in UK universities, pretty rare though (and still usually called blackboards).

Great research. Obviously I was not being 100% literal when I said we don't have green blackboards (heh) in the UK. I'm sure somewhere someone has one, but I've literally never seen a single one so they must be exceedingly rare.

Very interesting comment anyway; thanks!

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