It occurred to me the other day that there's an incredibly common piece of jargon in software which doesn't make any real sense in the modern world; and this jargon word is not safely hidden behind the scenes where it only bothers programmers, but instead it forms an important part of the user interface of a great many programs. And I've never seen it remarked upon before, which is why I only just noticed it myself after a decade and a half of using GUIs.

That word is ‘exit’.

In the old days of single-process operating systems like DOS, this word made complete sense. Your computer could only do one job at a time; so once you started (say) your word processor, you couldn't do anything other than word processing without first getting back out of that environment and returning to some other context, typically the command prompt from which you launched the word processor. Hence ‘exit’; the metaphor was that you, the user, were in some sense immersed in the word-processing environment, and you wanted to leave it and go somewhere else. And not just the user, either; it made sense from a programmer perspective as well, because the CPU was stuck executing the same program until it could get out of the word processor and go back to the operating system.

But none of this has been the case since the advent of the windowed GUI. Your word processor at no point defines the limits of your interaction with the computer; it's just one of many applications each of which is contained within its own window. You don't need to ‘exit’ it in order to do something else, because you're not trapped in it: you can quite happily do something else while the word processor is still running, and indeed you probably did. When you've finished word-processing, you want the word-processing program to terminate, or to shut down, or to disappear, or to close, or simply stop or end, but you probably no longer think in terms of getting out of it. And yet the vast majority (at least out of a hasty and unscientific small sample) of GUI applications still describe this function in their menu bar by the word ‘Exit’ – and even the most naïve users cheerfully take this for granted, because they accept that that's just the way user interface designers talk.

I suppose you could argue that you want the program to exit, to leave your screen and wander off to wherever software goes when it isn't running; but it doesn't seem to me that that's really been the intended metaphor at any point. Also it's unnecessarily inaccurate, and somewhat patronising: it smacks rather of telling small children that their deceased pet has ‘gone away’.

I don't imagine there's any getting away from it now; the word has become such standard terminology that users would probably be disoriented to find alternatives like ‘Vanish’ at the bottom of their File menu. But it struck me as interesting that this curious linguistic vestige of single-process operating systems is now so universal, even among people who never used such a system.