Those born into the computer age unwittingly use metaphors without awareness of their origins. I will explain one such metaphor painfully, and at length: CC.
Before the advent of word processors and personal computers, the typewriter was the dominant tool for producing professional documents. Here is a picture of Robert Caro’s typewriter, the Smith-Corona Electra 210:
An advantage of typewriters is that they can produce legible, consistently formatted documents. A disadvantage is that they do not scale: 1000 copies requires 1000 times the work, unless other accommodations are made. The mass production of a single document was the primary job of the printing press. Later, the mimeograph and the photocopier began to be used in certain schools and organizations. But printing presses, mimeographs, and photocopiers were all expensive.
So along with these more sophisticated tools, there was a simpler, more primal method for document duplication – the carbon copy. Carbon paper, a sheet with bound dry ink on one side, was placed in between two conventional sheets of paper, and the triplet fed into the typewriter. When the keys of the typewriter were struck, the type slug pressed against the ribbon, marking the top page with a character. The slug also pressed against the carbon paper, pressing the dried ink on the back side of the carbon paper onto the second plain sheet of paper, making the same mark. In this way, one key press marked two pages at once. Magic!
Style guidelines for typewritten letters and documents directed authors to indicate when multiple copies of the same document were being distributed to multiple recipients. The notation for this notification was to list the recipients after “cc”, for “carbon copy”.
In other words, an abbreviation for the means of duplication became a notification of duplication.
A variant is the “blind carbon copy“, or BCC. This originally meant carrying out the physical act of duplication – using carbon paper – but omitting the notification. Hence the “blind”: if you are looking at the document, you cannot determine the list of recipients. This carried over to email too.
If you are my age or older, you already knew this. If you are younger, you very likely did not. I was interested in computers in middle school but computer classes were not available. I did the next best thing and took a typing class. That’s how I learned.
Nathan Brixius 