1612: “Box Set” Implies Boxes Are Involved

If you’ll indulge me a moment, I need to complain about something. It’s not anything particularly important or relevant to the world at large, but it has been bugging me recently.

I’ll preface this by saying that I accept that language is in a constant state of flux, as much as many of us may not like the way it is changing on a seemingly daily basis thanks to the fast-moving nature of Internet culture. I accept that words and phrases change their meaning as time goes on — there are probably hundreds of words and phrases we all use on a daily basis that would have meant something completely different fifty, a hundred, two hundred, five hundred years ago. That’s fine.

What I’m not so cool with is when there’s an obvious attempt by someone (or a group of people) to change the meaning of a word or phrase to something that really doesn’t make sense in the slightest. There are a number of examples of this in modern parlance, but the one that is bugging me in this instance is the use of the term “box set”.

What does that term mean to you? To me, it means a box of something — usually some form of “complete collection”. In the case of DVDs and Blu-Rays, a box set would include multiple discs and encompass either a complete season or a complete run of a TV show, or perhaps a movie and discs of special features. In the case of music CDs, a box set might collect together a band’s singles or albums, or, again, provide a collection of tracks that you might not be able to get in another way. Even books can come in box sets — I used to have a box set of The Lord of the Rings that, rather than splitting the whole story into three volumes, split it down further into its smaller constituent novel-size books, making it seemingly much more digestible. (I still never made it all the way through, but I made it further than I probably would have if I were trying to plough through three volumes of several hundred pages apiece.)

The key thing all of those have in common is that a box is involved. They’re a physical object. They’re a box, containing a set of things. A box set. Do you see how that works? Pretty straightforward, no?

And, then, do you see how utterly stupid it is for digital TV services to refer to both video-on-demand and channels broadcasting a show’s complete run back-to-back as “box sets”? There is no box involved. There is no physical object involved. It is not something you can collect and own; it is not something you can keep. They are not even the same thing. They are, respectively, a complete series available for video streaming, and a complete series being broadcast back-to-back on live television. Granted, the term “box set” is much more concise and people probably know what it means. But that doesn’t stop it just being bloody wrong, all right?

I get the feeling this is the work of some marketer who thought it would be a jolly smashing idea to attempt to rebrand the term “box sets” from its increasingly irrelevant meaning with regard to physical media. After all, if physical media is on the way out, why not take a term that’s becoming obsolete and try to use it differently?

Because it’s dumb. Stop it.