Is “screen real estate” an accepted member of the English lexicon, or just another tired metaphor?

Real estate, of course, refers to an interest in real property (land and minerals) as opposed to personal property (everything else). A video display cannot in any sense be deemed real property, so the expression clearly arose as a metaphor. Most of the silly old IT metaphors (“information superhighway”) have withered away, mercifully. So why has this one remained?

Although none of the modern dictionaries currently recognizes the term, its appearance is ubiquitous. Fully half the Google hits for “real estate” point to “screen real estate.”

This wouldn’t matter so much if the expression weren’t so dreadful. We needn’t metaphorically conjure a plot of land in order to talk about the dimensions of pool tables and paper sizes. Nor, come to think of it, television screens. For that matter we don’t invoke “real estate” when talking about real estate: nobody says that a house contains 2500 square feet of real estate. But when referring to a computer display, nearly everyone refers to its surface plane as real estate.

Why not simply refer to its space?

What has happened of course is that early users of the term understood that it was a metaphor, and for reasons perhaps known only to themselves considered it clever or useful. Legions of subsequent users never bothered to think about it at all, which is not surprising as they typically know more about pixels than about parts of speech.

It’s pointless to bemoan the proliferation of this metaphor. But like my architect friend who points out that anybody can be an architect, I still deplore it. What was clever when new becomes tiresome after the thousandth iteration.