Does "delete" have negative connotations?

Question

I've noticed, when major connected device OSes remove a Bluetooth device from the list of known devices, they typically use "forget", "remove", or "unpair" instead of "delete".

Someone posited on a separate thread here the word "delete" is avoided because the non-computer analogies in most non-digital usages refer to a permanent erasure—probably one reason other phrasings are preferred.

I was curious if there is a resource to quantitatively assess the connotation of the word. My feeling is it also carries a somewhat negative/harsh connotation, but I wanted some way of getting quantitative evidence to prove or disprove this hypothesis.

Answer 1

It's not necessarily "negative". The reason you are seeing the phenomenon is two-fold.

The first is that you can't really "delete" something that cannot be "permanently gone". That is essentially the definition of delete. So, for example, we can delete files and we can delete applications (which are really just more files). That's the main reason you don't see it that often. We could technically call the removal of paired connections, such as Wifi, Bluetooth, USB devices, etc... a "deletion". But it wouldn't make as much sense as "forget", "unpair", "disconnect", "remove".

And that brings us to the second reason that you see those words more frequently. It's because they do carry a preferable connotation that it can be recovered. We could technically say we want to call it "deleting" our Bluetooth connection, for example. But it carries a heavy suggestion that this is forever, that it's gone....forever.

Delete is usually reserved for items that are meant to be destroyed and gone forever. Delete is a scary word to end-users. As the science of user interface design has progressed we have avoided the word "delete" because it just seems a littler scarier to most basic users.

Answer 2

You can't delete a physical item. You can only delete a file (directories are in fact files).
We often speak of "breaking a connection" by means of deleting a file which controls the connection at the software level. However, this is not necessary: changing some values in the file will terminate the dataflow (the "connection") even though the file itself remains.

To "forget" a connection is a simple way of indicating that the file which contains the necessary info for that connection is deleted or at least cleared of the necessary data.

To "unpair" means to break the connection, not necessarily by "forgetting" it but simply not building up the software stack which allows data flow. If you look at a GUI for Bluetooth or WiFi, you typically see a list of potential devices or networks, only one of which is connected at a given time.