sid: (Metropolis clock)
sid ([personal profile] sid) wrote2011-04-28 12:26 am

A timely thought

As the days of analog timepieces fade into history, will the directions "Turn clockwise to tighten" soon lose all meaning?

Will the expression persist, complete with scholarly footnotes and diagrams?

What could possibly replace it?

Any youngsters out there who can give a current status report?

And, just for fun, what other words or phrases can you think of that belong to the past but live on in the present? (It's late, and all I can think of right now is "Hold your horses!")
princessofgeeks: (Default)

[personal profile] princessofgeeks 2011-04-28 11:09 am (UTC)(link)
dialing a phone, dial tone

typing. my kids learn keyboarding, which is.... wrong.




cxcvi: Red cubes, sitting on a reflective surface, with a white background (Default)

[personal profile] cxcvi 2011-04-28 11:37 am (UTC)(link)
And along with that, the reasons of why we have the QWERTY layout will also probably be lost. The layout itself, however, will probably remain, unless someone really successful does something about it with the default layout of one of their products...
princessofgeeks: (Default)

[personal profile] princessofgeeks 2011-04-28 12:06 pm (UTC)(link)
yeah, like the metric system, i fear the dvorak keyboard is a logical wonderful thing that the USA will never embrace. which is SO WEIRD.
cxcvi: Red cubes, sitting on a reflective surface, with a white background (Default)

[personal profile] cxcvi 2011-04-28 12:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Both of those things, though, take both time and energy to learn. Something that not all of us have in plentiful supply...
princessofgeeks: (Default)

[personal profile] princessofgeeks 2011-04-28 12:12 pm (UTC)(link)
oh, certainly. but i am old enough to remember when we ALMOST went metric in the seventies. so close and yet so far....

i'll never learn dvorak now; it's too late for me. but if the whole country decided to teach fourth graders dvorak only? in a generation it would be done.

[personal profile] catspaw 2011-04-29 07:06 pm (UTC)(link)
I'm still not metric - I have to ask always, 'what's 500 g really?' I'm thankful that I'm not alone: it's still qutie possible, over here, to walk into a wood yard and ask for 2 metres of 2 by 4 ;-) And we always, *always* do cold in Centigrade and hot in Fahrenheit, what's with that?

[personal profile] catspaw 2011-04-29 07:58 pm (UTC)(link)
We prefer to think of it as 'ploughing our own furrow' ;-)
codeman38: Osaka from Azumanga Daioh questioning whether Apple's 'think different' slogan should be 'differently'. (think different)

[personal profile] codeman38 2011-04-28 12:29 pm (UTC)(link)
On the "dial" note... I remember seeing some badly translated instructions once-- can't remember specifically what for, but it was some sort of electronic device made in China-- where the term "stir" was used to refer to dialing a number. (Google confirms the commonness of this mistranslation.) Thing is, that actually makes perfect sense when you think about the context of an old-fashioned phone dial-- and yet, it just sounds so weird.