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Lakoff & Johnson’s groundbreaking 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By, descriptively illuminated the metaphorical mental models humans instinctively use to make sense of and communicate with abstract concepts.

Panini Press is proud to present this instant classic by Prof. Jen Ecks, a spiritual successor to Lakoff & Johnson that takes the tack of inverting its analysis along many of the dimensions of their foundational metaphorical lens—offering prescriptive explanations of concrete metaphorical models that can help us make sense of and navigate the built environment of the physical world that we modern humans find ourselves in.

This important work presents seventy-three highly salient mechanical metaphors—many illustrated—presented through a cohesive and unifying theoropractical framework.

From the Introduction:

Unfortunately, design thinking is all but absent from most modern educational paradigms, and few young people are exposed to thoughts of the sort espoused by Viollet-le-Duc and distilled by Sullivan into the pithy maxim, “Form follows function.” There has been a steady generational decline in functional mechanical competence. While every generation laments the shortcomings of the next—the Boomers may actually be right about the Millennials being unable to effectively use basic tools. The trend only seems to be accelerating through Gen Z and Gen Alpha. Fearing that the freshly hatched Gen Beta will not only be unable to write in cursive, read a map, or tie their shoes, but also unable to navigate the built environment of public spaces or even their own homes (should they ever be able to afford to move out of their parents’ place), I have written this book to provide the much-needed inculcation of valuable mechanical metaphors and other elements of design thinking, physical reasoning, and practical knowledge into the youth in whom they may otherwise be lacking.

From Chapter Two—Foundational Concepts:

A seemingly introductorily useful but ultimately pernicious mechanical mnemonic is the ubiquitous “righty-tighty, lefty-loosey” hint at how to turn a screw, nut, knob, lightbulb, or other threaded item or analogous entity to get the desired movement or other result. While it works reasonably well in certain simplistic situations—much like the rightly much maligned “i before e except after c” spelling mnemonic—its greatest weakness is that it requires a consistent and meaningful definition of “right” and “left”, which does not exist.

The user of this mnemonic must be looking from the direction of the head of the item to be turned, and must intuitively or explicitly understand that the portion that moves “right” or “left” is the “upper” (from the user’s perspective) part of the item to be turned. There are many scenarios where this can fall apart—or fail to properly fall apart because that one screw has been tightened fast and stripped into oblivion:

• Only the “lower” portion of the screw head, nut, or wheel is visible, and the wrong portion is moved “right” or “left”.
• The definition of “upper” is not taken as relative, such as when the user is in an awkward position, like laying under the workpiece, or hanging upside down over the side of something while working.
• The item doesn’t have an obvious head or “top” around which to orient, such as a nut in a non-trivial orientation.
• The workpiece is not “below” or “in front of” the user, such as screwing or unscrewing something when reaching underneath a larger item without being able to see.
• The notions of “tight/loose”, “up/down”, or “on/off” don’t have an obvious correlate, such as a nut on a long threaded rod. If you need it to go to the left, is that “tighter” or “looser”?
• The item is threaded in the reverse direction (i.e., left-handed thread).

A far superior mnemonic is the Right Hand Rule, which tells you that in order for a common (right-handed) threaded item, if you turn it in the direction the fingers on your right hand curl, it will move in the direction your thumb points. It seems inherently more precise than “righty-tighty”, and it does not suffer from any of the limitations of inferior mnemonics.

The curl of your right hand’s fingers is consistent. You can orient your thumb in the direction you need your item to travel—regardless of its orientation, either absolute or relative to you—and then often simply wrap your hand around the item and turn it in as needed. If you know you are dealing with something with left-handed threading, you can just use your left hand to perform the familiar operations; mirroring motions from one hand to the other is usually much easier than trying to properly invert familiar actions on the same hand.

From Chapter Three—Around the House:

Another very practical example that I and others of my generation experienced as a child—and which I have seen adult Millennials and Gen Z struggle with when visiting older relatives—involves dealing with showers or bathtubs with two knobs, one for hot water and one for cold. The inexperienced and unenlightened often struggle to reach the nirvana of appropriate temperature and volume of water. Many who succeed do so by sheer luck, or—over the course of repeated exposure—by rote learning. Both are inferior to actual understanding, which is readily accomplished through a pair of mechanical metaphors.

Controlling the volume of water can be understood as a simple rack-and-double-pinion gearing system, with the knobs as pinions and the rack below the knobs. Spinning either knob clockwise moves the metaphorical rack to the left, decreasing the water volume; spinning either counterclockwise moves the rack to the right, increasing water volume.

Note that the metaphorical rack is placed below the pinion-knobs for speaker-readers of left-to-right languages, so that they may also take advantage of the abstract linguistic metaphor that left is less and right is more, aligning with reading direction. For speaker-readers of right-to-left languages, the rack can be placed above the pinion-knobs align less-to-more motion with the intuitive abstract metaphor of reading direction.

Along another dimension—both in the abstractly concrete configuration space of the volume/temperature system and in the concretely abstract metaphorical space of rack gears—we can align another, bifacial rack vertically to represent the effect of the knobs on water temperature.

The gears of this practical mechanical metaphor mesh smoothly with the intuitive abstract linguistic metaphors that up is more and hot is more (and thus up is hot). As such, turning the cold knob clockwise or the hot knob counterclockwise will increase the temperature of the water.

The lack of these highly explanatory, mechanically intuitive metaphors may have been a leading factor in the development and spread of the abomination that is the one-dimensional one-knob shower/tub faucet that makes design thinkers and shower connoisseurs both lament.

Considerations for advanced mechanical thinkers: Should you as a parent or educator find yourself in the enviable position of instructing a young person in these metaphors only to find them challenging their “realism”, do not despair! An advanced learning opportunity has presented itself! As the mechanically inclined reader will have already noted, having two pinion-knobs on a single rack prevents them from moving independently, decreasing the realism of the mechanical metaphor. Simply put, few metaphors are exact, and we expect them to serve primarily as an aid to understanding. Another somewhat subtle—but obvious in hindsight—point of irrealism is that the movement of the rack as described doesn’t actually do anything to affect volume or temperature.

Advanced study questions: How do the knobs actually directly control the amount of water that comes out of the faucet? How could the rack or pinions be modified to make them independent? What are the benefits and drawbacks of options such as (i) two independent racks, each controlled by one knob, or (ii) an additional mechanism—such as pulling the knob out before turning—that engages only one pinion at a time? If the racks actually controlled the water temperature or water volume directly, what mechanism would make that possible. Would independent mechanisms controlling temperature and volume be better or worse for the user than the real-world practicality of the intertwined multi-phasic control of temperature and volume the knobs provide, where, for example, increasing cold water increases volume while lowering temperature? How could such independent control mechanisms work in the real world?

Considerations for the fledgling mechanical thinker: If you, as a parent or educator, find yourself in the unenviable position of instructing a young person in these metaphors only to find them unable to comprehend them, you can fall back on (and reinforce) the right hand rule described in Chapter Two.

A few addition highlights that are particularly popular with young learners:

• Chapter Five—Farming, among several other topics, relates the Fibonacci series to rabbit breeding.
• Chapter Seven—Basic Mathematics opens with an imaginary, expanding scytale-like cylinder to physically implement the Sieve of Eratosthenes to find prime numbers. Intermediate applications of related ideas lead to an intuitive understanding of the Ulam spiral.
• The highlight of Chapter Eleven—Sociocultural Geometry is the application of catastrophe theory to the understanding of humor, giving the sophisticated student a topological metaphor for how to properly tell a joke.
• The first section of Chapter Thirteen—Basic Physics is organized around a sub-theme, “Physics is your friend”, and gives an intuitive understanding of the first few derivatives of position—velocity, acceleration, and jerk—through the familiar experience of accelerating in a car or other powered vehicle.
• Slightly more complex scenarios in Chapter Seventeen—Biomechanics reveal the intuitive meaning of higher order derivatives, such as snap, crackle, and pop, and relate them to the physicality of biomechanics and the virtual simulation thereof.
• Chapter Nineteen—Intermediate Mathematics delves into the various integrals of position—limited to absement, absity, abseleration, and abserk for simplicity’s sake—and their intuitive metaphorical interpretations.
• Chapter Twenty-Three—Applied Mathematics points out that taking the Fourier transform of a cat is a bad idea, but leaning into Fourier series as a method of successive approximations is intuitively felicitous. This chapter also features a pullout poster featuring the slogan “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Epicycles”.

Finally, just a taste of our favorite line from the Conclusion:

As with so many things in life, once you have a greater understanding of the mechanical metaphors and design thinking, physical reasoning, and practical knowledge that underpin a truly embodied understanding of our world, many things boil down to this: “It’s a simple matter of geometry.”