When you first read Nick Hornby's novel High Fidelity, you knew immediately what the narrator was talking about when he said, "I spent hours putting that cassette together.... A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do."
But now that the editors of the Concise Oxford English Dictionary have decided to remove the term "cassette tape" from its pages, a certain amount of literary confusion may be inevitable in the future.
On his Facebook page, Hornby wrote: "So let me get this straight: in ten years' time, someone will be reading a book--High Fidelity, say--and comes across a term that he or she doesn't understand, and goes to a dictionary, and it's not there? Thanks, OED."
