I Am All Kinds Of Nerd

[bloodyrosemccoy]

Sitting together training on a program at the Space Place, and one of the instructions included "Click the gear icon to get to settings."

And I thought, "Well, duh."

Then I started thinking about how odd it is that we all know what a gear icon signifies, even though very few computers have any kind of clockwork mechanisms that would utilize gears.

Same principle as the much-noted Save icon being a floppy disk, a thing that is all but extinct around here except with certain anachronism enthusiasts, or the Call icon on your phone being an old-school receive despite your actual phone being a rectangle. I love that it's logographic, so it's a visual representation of how etymology works.

And etymology is a blast. You get the same kinds of ideas in English--I love how the word "screen" has evolved to mean about eight million different things, and you can follow each metaphorical stage of it. (Divider -> finely-woven divider -> sheet on which you project images -> thing on which images appear)

Sometimes people at the Space Place ask me what my degree is in, and they always laugh a little when I say "linguistics and anthropology." But come on. Space is fun, but by god language is pretty damn entertaining, too.

Comments

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

Yes! I was having a conversation with someone today who wanted a fancy Greek word for a particular sort of engagement with ideas, and I kept coming back to "But in Greek, all these words meant very basic things, and we grabbed a single metaphorical subset of those concepts to mean this specific technical concept." We ended up essentially reinventing the etymology of "hypothesis" about three times, because it ends up meaning something so simple. To set beneath => to construct the foundation of a building => the beginning idea you start from to develop further ideas.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

Greek and Latin are fun! I used to love having someone read out a Greek/Latin derived word in the dictionary and guessing what it meant based on the components. I love how basic they are.

I also get obsessive over certain roots. For a long time I was really fascinated by the "-ject" root. I took a certain delight in parsing the basic meanings of words with that root and trying to figure out how the metaphor got there.

(Also, one time my sister and I were discussing a meeting between a unicorn and a triceratops and I wound up trying to figure out the Greek word for "unicorn" myself. I came up with "monoceros," and later learned that actually was the word, and was inordinately proud of myself.)

[ellixis.livejournal.com]

Upon thinking about it, I think the origin of the gear as an icon for the settings options must be the metaphorical "workings" of the program - the hidden mechanics, the "nuts and bolts" or the "clockwork" of it; as my spouse commented, it's hard to make a simple, iconic representation of a microchip, and USBs have the circuitry symbology nailed down already. But the clockwork metaphor is a simple and easily accessible one, even though we have very little actual clockwork in our everyday lives any more. Fascinating to think about.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I'm sure that's what the origin was--the inner workings of a program! I just think it's funny that we all understand that's what it means when actual gears don't really apply to the thing in question.

[marag.livejournal.com]

I love language. Yesterday, I was introducing Barak to the idea of words that are spelled and pronounced the same but mean different things. His art teacher had talked about "abstract art" and I pointed out that when I hear the word "abstract", I think of an abstract of a paper.

I was about to tell him about flammable and inflammable, but Yael's bus arrived and we were interrupted :)

[redbird]

I am amused by the "play your messages" icon on my portable phone handset: it's a cassette tape, which is to say two loops joined by a line. I'm of an age to have used cassette tapes (I think we tossed our music cassettes when we moved a couple of years ago, but we might still have some), which means I know that the sketch is of what's inside the flat plastic box.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I don't have any home videos of myself as a kid, but we do have a lot of audio cassettes Mom made of everyday life. They're fascinating. I loved to record on blank cassettes!

I really love old sci-fi for just how often "tapes" appear. For some reason it just fills me with glee when they're flying around the galaxy watching big reel-to-reel or cassette tapes.

[stormteller.livejournal.com]

When I think of futuric sci-fi, I like to imagine what people then would think of our culture and technology. I believe they would be mostly perplexed (and partially disgusted).

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I have that reaction to it now.