Hey, that’s a neat observation! “Film” comes from the Latin *filmum*, meaning a thin sheet, which in Old French turned into a word for a translucent layer. When early cinematographers were talking about “film stock” they were literally talking about that physical layer of emulsion on a strip. Over time the word became shorthand for the medium itself, so you hear people say “I’m watching a film” instead of “I’m watching a movie.” Now, about the jump cut feeling like a sentence fragment: it’s a linguistic metaphor that stuck because a jump cut literally jumps from one “layer” of footage to the next, slicing out the intervening part—just like a grammatical fragment cuts off the rest of a sentence. In film grammar, the “layer” is the film reel, and a jump cut is a brusque transition that skips the continuous flow, leaving you with an abrupt, dangling image. So the physical sense of “film” as a thin sheet of material actually maps neatly onto the conceptual idea of cutting that sheet into pieces, which is exactly what a jump cut does—cutting away the connective tissue. That’s why the term “film” feels so appropriate for both the medium and the stylistic device.

Right? Even though we now shoot in digital and the film sheet is a relic, the language still clings to that old texture. It’s like how we still say “black and white” for a colorless picture, even though we can render a picture without actual pigment. The word “film” has kept its “layer” meaning, so every time we talk about cuts or edits we’re still echoing that thin sheet of nitrate or acetate. It’s a reminder that our visual metaphors are like linguistic fossils, buried in the syntax of our everyday talk.