Re:A comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters...
by whatshisface on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @02:51PM
(#21695991)
A word or symbol does not represent every single thing that can be free-associated with it. If you want to show that "1" represents the Washington Monument, it is not sufficient (or even necessary) to point out that they're the same shape, you have to show some evidence that there once was a culture that used the symbol "1" whenever they wanted to say "2 15th St NW, Washington, DC."
Re:A comment on Hacker News led to 4½ new Unicode characters...
by pasabagi on Tuesday December 03, 2019 @03:16PM
(#21696234)
Using '1' to symbolise the washington monument would be reasonable, if the washington monument was something people very commonly referred to. It would also be reasonable to describe that as phallic. It wouldn't be reasonable to use 1 to refer to an address in DC, because you're jumping from three obviously formally similar things, to the street address of one of those things.
It's a pretty good example of what people mean by free association - and why what I'm(1) doing isn't.
1- I mean, obviously I'm about the millionth person to make this particular observation.
This 1/0 man/woman white/black kind of binary is so ubiquitous in our culture it's kind of redundant to go and find examples - but it is in itself interesting that when you mention stuff like this, some people will always find a way to claim it is nonsense.
I think it's a desire for security amongst political turbulence - you say, this stuff is abstract and clean and without cultural baggage, so I can hide in it from the world, which is ugly and ambiguous and provokes uncomfortable reactions.
It's a kind of desire that's really common around engineering, mathsy people - I mean, part of the attraction of these subjects is you don't have to navigate anything sticky. So that's why it usually provokes a pretty extreme reaction if you profane the temple by bringing cultural stuff in.