View from the North 40: We should re-learn how to use our words

I think we’re in trouble when the phrase “everything old is new again” applies to the writing of instruction manuals.

Prehistoric drawings all over the world show images of all types of animals that lived in the region when the paintings were made – and we’re talking 20,000 to 100,000 years ago, maybe more. Those paintings serve as Basic Hunting 101 instructions for hunter gatherers: We need to eat. Go to the “store.” Kill one of these.

Of course, some of the paintings show the animals with a human form laying flat out on the ground near it. That, of course, is the instruction: Be wary of this one, it kills you.

Plenty of cave drawings show hunters with bow and arrows or spears, along with arrows and spears sticking out of the animals, in case those hunters needed instructions on how to do the killing. One of my favorites is at Marsaulus in France and it includes arrows of the kind used to point things out in, say, a modern presentation, “--->”.

It’s like painter had been fielding stupid questions and went all pointer-rage on them: “No, Bob, you don’t just kill the ones that have arrows drawn in them. You can kill this one, this one here, this one over there, or even this one all the way – hey, Bob, pay attention, follow the arrow because you can kill this one all the way over here, too. Just kill something, because I am hungry.”

But this is all pretty rudimentary for instructions: You kill these. These will try to kill you. Do your killing by projecting the pointy end of your weapon into your prey. That’s it. No hunter safety. No fire arms instruction. No rundown on humane killing practices.

Then the Egyptians came up with hieroglyphic writing, which was just fancy picture symbols – more sophisticated than a cave painting, but also lacking precision. In fact, here’s the first vertical line of the inscriptions that describe the formula for the ascent of King Pepi I to heaven and for his eternal supply of food and drink from an Egyptian 6th Dynasty tablet:

A half-broken off something over a spaceship, followed by a cucumber, a butcher knife and a bird, a four-blade airplane propeller and two wedge-shaped wheel chocks, a blunt arrowhead (or morel mushroom) and a just-popped champagne bottle, an Adderall, two semicolons and a lucky horseshoe.

Good luck in heaven with that, Pepi, though I don’t know what you’re going to do with those two semicolons.

Fortunately, humans eventually developed alphabets and sentences. It was all pretty specialized, so in Western culture that meant the monks and nuns were writing everything. It was beautiful and all written in ornate calligraphy with colorful illustrations. But mostly those folks were writing elaborate instructions on how to get to heaven-slash-avoid hell.

They also wrote down extensive family trees for noble families, which were instruction manuals on how to avoid inbreeding. It didn’t necessarily work so well, but I blame lack of support for the sciences. Biology is your friend.

Then came the Industrial Age and people were totally into knowledge, science and machines, and these folks wrote a lot of how-to manuals and words. It was probably the golden age of instruction manuals — supported extensively by the printing press.

But somewhere in the later 1900s we started seeing another phenomenon: instructions written in broken English.

At first we were all thinking, “What is this? Oh, well, this isn’t too bad. I understand exactly what they’re saying.” This got progressive worse. The upside was that we could use it as a form of product evaluation. If their English-as-a-second-language person was decent then, hey, it must be a good product.

But dark period came when you would read the instructions, then take a moment to determine if you’d had a stroke or something, because you would recognize the words as English, but have no clue why they were put together.

But, no, it wasn’t a stroke. It was a lateral shift in technology.

A human brain that might say, “Hey, maybe I should double check some of these phrases and terms for correctness among English speaking people of the world.” Computers don’t think like that, and the early translators were sketchy at best.

A phrase like: “To change the screen readout between metric and English standard measurement, press Enter then Input and choose the preferred mode.”

Would read: “To alter subterfuge speak outside between meter and the English typical measure meaning, printer Come In then Input and make choices the favored fashion.”

Not a stroke, but you see what I’m getting at.

In recent years, instruction manuals have performed another lateral shift in technology, this time away from words and back to pictures and symbols, a sort of hybrid language of the cave paintings and hieroglyphics.

To remove the head from my new vacuum cleaner and check for clogs, I’m supposed to shoot it in the back with an arrow so that it dies face forward onto the floor, then I detach a part that looks like miniature headphones, wrap this around a sub-woofer and arrow them to the right. Then I shoot arrows at the head until it falls off. At which time I am supposed to put one of my eyes in a hole at the dead vacuum’s neck.

Humanity has come so far in my lifetime.

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Maybe if I drink some of King Pepi’s champagne, I will be enlightened enough to understand this. I might as well, it’s not like I’m going to be doing any vacuuming at http://www.facebook.com/viewfromthenorth40.com .