The graveyard

when does the corpse stop working?

Unicode: U+1F4BE floppy disk · U+1F4DE telephone receiver · U+2699 gear · U+1F50D magnifier
The job: Name an operation — save, call, configure, search — by picturing the object that used to perform it.
Standards: None, and none possible: these are conventions, not registrations. Sony ended consumer floppy-disk manufacture in 2011, so anyone under about twenty-five has never handled the object 💾 depicts, and the mark still means save everywhere. The gear has not turned anything in living memory. The receiver shape left most homes a generation ago.
Failure modes: The obvious prediction — that a dead referent kills the icon — is wrong, and the reason is the interesting part. These marks survive by ceasing to be pictures: they were learned as arbitrary labels rather than read as depictions, and an arbitrary label does not care whether its object exists. What actually breaks is teachability. A new user can no longer infer the meaning, only memorise it, so the icon quietly converts from a picture into vocabulary. Drift is the second failure: 🔍 now means both search and zoom, which are different operations sharing one mark.
Cultural flips: The receiver was never universal. In places that went straight to mobile telephony without a landline generation, the handset silhouette is a museum object being used as a verb. The gear fares better only because mechanical settings survived longer in machinery than in telephones.

Sources · 3

documented Sony’s end of consumer floppy-disk production, 2011, and the disk’s disappearance from consumer hardware well before that.
documented The Unicode Standard, for the encoded forms of each mark.
traditional The Institute’s reading that skeuomorphs survive precisely by being learned as arbitrary rather than depictive. It explains the evidence and it is an inference, not a finding.