A timely thought

[sid]

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!")

Comments

[princessofgeeks]

dialing a phone, dial tone

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

[cxcvi]

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]

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]

Both of those things, though, take both time and energy to learn. Something that not all of us have in plentiful supply...

[princessofgeeks]

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.

[sid]

I never could grasp metric, so I was relieved when that plan fell apart. Stubborn!America iz stubborn.

[catspaw]

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?

[sid]

You're a very confused people, aren't you? :-D

[catspaw]

We prefer to think of it as 'ploughing our own furrow' ;-)

[codeman38]

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.

[sid]

Yeah, it's pretty much the same motion at a slightly different angle! Unless you're a person who normally stirs things counter-clockwise - that would not transfer well to dialing a number! :-D

And speaking of problems dialing numbers, I remember the first time I used a phone. I was probably about six years old, calling my father to pick me up from a schoolmate's birthday party. I don't remember if I had trouble figuring out which way to turn the dial. I did succeed in dialing my number, though.

And then I picked up the handset. *g*

Oops? Let's try that again. :-D

[sid]

Even hanging up isn't the same!

I think they called it 'keyboard skills' when my nephew was taking it in school. My typing class had more manual than electric typewriters, so we had to switch around throughout the semester to give everyone a chance at the electrics!