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

[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.)