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A comment on The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline. Parent comment

Re:The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline by emodendroket on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @09:54AM (#12172740)
Yeah, but why are red/yellow/green "universal" colors for driving? I don't think it's because of some innate human love for those particular meanings of the colors. In fact, I'd bet that in a society without cars the red octagon would not be so "universally" understood to mean "stop."
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Re:The Apple Goes Mushy Part I: OS X's Interface Decline by sjwright on Wednesday July 27, 2016 @09:55PM (#12177842)
Basic colour meanings of red and green transcend many genres of human existence, from business (using a red pen, or being "in the red") to entire gamuts of electronics and engineering, red warning stickers, etc.

I agree that the octagon is arbitrary. But that's beside the point, because it's self-evidently arbitrary. Nobody assumes there must be a deeper meaning behind a basic shape. The iconography of a floppy disk is not a basic shape.

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