The Occasional Blargh

Adobe is…

…obviously never going to get that correction from John Gruber.  Though they probably never asked for one. In fact, it’s doubtful Adobe ever noticed that post where Gruber misreads their press release, and criticizes the company from that misreading.

But I do find it weird how Gruber is praising Apple for mission statements whose only difference from Adobe’s investment statements are the replacement of conditional words with triumphalist hyperbole.

The biggest change, no surprise, is from biz-dev bullshit to plain English, four days before Steve Jobs became CEO in September 1997.

So, once again, Gruber confuses hyperbole with “plain English.” The only reason the statements collected by Alexandre Gollner aren’t bullshit is that none of them are outright dishonest. That includes the pre-September 1997 statements Gruber didn’t like. Those old statements told you far more about what Apple does than today’s puffery. Now everybody knows what Apple does, so they don’t need to say so on its PR. But neither the pre-Jobs statements nor the modern statements are what I would call bullshit.

You don’t really notice this, but most iconic representations of actions and objects are based on objects from ten, twenty, thirty years ago or more. Scott Hanselman noticed this.

One of the funnier things from John Gruber’s blog was his ongoing crusade against the floppy-disk icon used to denote the Save action, which concluded with this post promoting the idea of doing away with the icon and saving altogether. (Ironically, when he got his wish, he had trouble coping.) Apparantly lost on him was that even his dear iPhone, iPad and Macs (along with almost every other device) also used icons based on obsolete items.  The phone icon of an iPhone is a curved handset. Voice mail is represented by a spool of audio-cassette tape. Electronic mail, and maybe other types of instant messaging is represented by pictures of envelopes, postage stamps or even outdoor free-standing mailbox. You’ll see a Larry King Live or game-show host microphone to represent audio input of most stripes. There are no gears in an iPad, an iPhone or a laptop computer (aside for perhaps the mechnical hard drive in many of the latter), but that is Apple’s representation for altering the settings in a control panel.

And about control panels, what we call that stuff betray that these concepts predated the iPhone. With machines, there once was a whole panel where the major controls of the device resided. Or dialing a phone number, a phrase still used even though dials disappeared from phones in the 1970s or 80s. Speaking of dials, Tiny Toon Adventures exhorted people to not “touch that dial”, even though dials disappeared from televisions (and most radios for that matter) roughly around the same time.

Icongraphy and pictography are very much like languages and as such the pictures, like words in languages, can grow on and outlive the the initial physical object or idea that inspired it. We still refer to lunacy even though we really don’t think the moon drives people crazy. We don’t think this day of the week, Sunday, has any closer connection to the sun than the other days. Likewise, despite decades of women wearing jeans without controversy and the continued existance of Scotsmen in kilts, pictograms will still distinguish men and women by placing the woman in a skirt/dress and the man in pants. Or to be much more cryptic, Venus’ hand mirror (♀) and Mars’ shield and spear (♂) could be used instead, though fewer men will ever make use of a spear while many do make use of hand mirrors.

In other words, it’s not really that big of a deal we still save to floppy. We are writing commentary about it using pictures even older than that whose original physical world meaning has long been lost. I am, of course, referring to these letters which have been put together in the words that populate this post and the posts I have linked to.

Wherefore art thou Wherefore?

I'm still quite amazed how fast responses come on the internet. Wherefore this post is not yet a half-day old and the daring John Gruber has already linked back to it. Of course he shouldn't feel too bad over thinking wherefore means where. I'm not going to give hard numbers based on this but using Google Blog Search, I get only about two or three post per result page where wherefore is used correctly (including sites where I would expect much better, like the Huffington Post.). In its credit, the first several results from Google's main web search are in fact pages to educate on the correct meaning of wherefore. Unfortunately though, Gruber's piece is the 5th result due in part to his popularity as the go-to Apple blogger (as folks are linking to the good iPhone analysis), and perhaps in part to us linking to it as an example of a misuse of the word).

Figuring out why everybody thinks it means where is way above my abilities (This sounds like a job for Language Log!), but I suspect it is because it makes superficial sense. The Wherefore line are among her first words after she steps out onto her balcony, before she starts musing about her misfortune of falling in love with a Montague, or that he's a good man despite the name. Lacking context, it is very easy to see her asking where Romeo is, but even with the stanzas that follow, the "where is Romeo" interpretation doesn't stop making sense. So with wherefore's usage outside of Shakespeare plays, and legal documents hovering near nil, wherefore morphs into where in many minds.

That said, I should note it gets more fun as wherefore can mean because as well.