At the risk of inventing a word for which a unknown-to-me synonym already exists - how about epinym (with an i, not an o).
I'm referring to words and expressions, often technology-based, that have not been around as long as the processes or realities they describe - e.g. regular as clockwork, clockwise. What did they call that before clocks existed? OK, that question is probably easy enough to answer, but my real question is, what do you call such words and expressions?
OK, maybe you could call a lot of them neologisms. But clocks have been around for the better part of a millennium. You could hardly still call clockwise a neologism after all this time.
Any ideas?
Here's a few more examples:
A mile a minute
Spinning one's wheels
To sound like a broken record
This is not rocket science/brain surgery
etc etc etc
A couple more examples would be the suffixes -speak and -gate.
I'm not the first person to wonder how people described the size of hailstones before golf was invented.
I realize golf is very old, but for what it's worth, hailstones have often been compared to the following (dates are just single examples, not earliest examples):
a man's head 1883
buckshot 1885
eggs 1868
hens' eggs 1852
large hickory nuts 1854
large marbles 1886
marbles 1857
marbles and hens' eggs 1900
musket bullets 1860
pigeons' eggs 1845
pullets' eggs 1871
small peas 1854
stones 1883
very small peas 1854
walnuts 1878
I think that I know that man's great-grandson.