In alt.home.repair on Mon, 01 Aug 2005 13:31:44 -0500
posted:

On Mon, 1 Aug 2005 12:00:20 -0400, "ng_reader"
wrote:

It's something a business does to:

1) not hire another person but instead "invest" in electronics
2) basically the use of a shared computer in some prefabricated melamine
enclosure
A) allows you to
a) find gifts for those with a wedding registry
b) print duplicate photos from originals
c) purchase gift certificates of buy that stores goods on-line


Thanks to all that replied (except those using vulgar words).
I also heard the ATM (and other) cash machines at banks and other
public places are called kiosks. Apparently this is a modern word
because my older dictionary does not contain it.

Things are not always as they appear. Merriam-Websters Ninth New
Collegiate dates the word in English to 1625. The use of kiosk to
refer to a small structure in a shopping mall only became common after
there were shopping malls.

The use of kiosk to mean a photographic machine or an ATM may catch
on, but for now it is a misunderstanding of what the word means.
Kiosk refers to the structure and not to what is, once was, or could
have been put in the structure.

There are some food recipes called filled or stuffed, in which only
the filling is served some or most of the time, and not what the
filling was meant to be stuffed into. Yet the original name of the
recipe is retained. "Stove-top stuffing" is probably one example, at
least when not stuffed into anything. Somehow, I think that is more
reasonable, because it is the particular recipe of the stuffing that
was considered worth notice.

In the case of an ATM kiosk, it is the entryway, inside the main door
but before the second set of doors that lead to a bank, that is the
kiosk**. Even that is probably metaphoric, because it's not really a
structure. It's the bank building with an extra set of inside doors
that can be locked to allow people access to the ATM's but not into
the bank, after closing hours. But if one can't find a separate room
or at least something to *call* a structure, it's an ATM, not a kiosk.

**ATMs mounted in the outside wall of a bank are not kiosks and are
not in kiosks.

Maybe there were some early appearance of photo machines that were in
kiosks, but I myself didn't see one. Until a substantial percentage of
the population uses kiosk to mean a free-standing photo machine or
ATM, it's just commercial-speak, argot, shop lingo, or a figure of
speech, and not within a standard English definition.

Meirman
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