A change in terminology

Vim doesn’t call “copying and pasting”, “copying and pasting”. Instead, you’ll hear the words “yanking” for copying, and “putting” for pasting.

This kind of makes sense when you think about what “yank” and “put” mean in English, but it is a departure from the usual terminology.

Why is this? We can only really guess. It’s likely that, in the early days of Vi (the precursor to Vim), the author assigned an unused letter to the copying operation, and then searched through possible words for a mnemonic to go with that letter.

In any case, “yanking” just means copying, and “putting” just means pasting.