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28 jun 06 "Why is it Upside down , why not downside up?" questions are printed as they were sent, along with spacing, capitalization, and grammatical errors. just so you know. my refusal to capitalize is a style choice. just so you know. let's consider an object without a necessary top and bottom -- some odd shape that's sitting on a desk, like a little amorphous iron sculpture. we consider the up-side of things first, because it's on top, and in our view, and more frequently under immediate consideration. when an object is flipped over, we take this "up side", that we see and consider, and change it to the "down side." the "up side" is the thing that's being manipulated, in our minds. there's no functionality to this object's top or bottom, but i can see the upside -- the downside is on the table. i'm standing over it. so, i grab that "up side" and re-arrange the object so that the former up-side is now against the table. it's just a matter of how we conceptualize objects. why does answering this question make me feel retarded? let's consider an object that we approach from underneath (such as a 20 foot high iron sculpture of a blob). we walk up to it, and imagine turning it over. even though you might anticipate that someone would say "turn it downside up", because the downside is what's under primary consideration (what's in front of you) and what's being manipulated, no one says this, because the situation of the 20 foot blob sculpture arises infrequently enough that "turn it downside up" hasn't been developed as a phrase. so if you don't want to say "turn it upside down" because of conceptual issues in this case, your other alternatives are "flip it over," "turn it over," etc, without reference to which side goes where. i am now profoundly retarded. |
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