The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all learned.
-Bruce Ediger
I saw that a couple of days ago and managed to work it into a
conversation. Well received.
Rinaldi
--
We all know Linux is great...it does infinite loops in 5 seconds.
--Linus Torvalds
Pardon my English, can someone explain this quote for me?
>> I found this in somebody's .signature, and thought it was clever:
>> The only "intuitive" interface is the nipple. After that, it's all
>> learned.
> Pardon my English, can someone explain this quote for me?
Bookmark this one:
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/cgi-bin/webwn/?stage=1&word=nipple
Remarkably the explanation is not as good as normal, so for this time.
;)
The nipple is the brown part off a breast which gives milk to babies.
Groetjes, Han.
--
homepage : http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanb
pgpkey : http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanb/keys/Han_pubkey.asc )
email : h a n @ m i j n c o m p u t e r . n l (
irc : fontana.openprojects.net#anka c[ ]
It refers to a baby's natural instinct to take nourishment from its
mother's breast.
This may or may not be the original quote, in full context, but it looks right
to me.
The interfaces being compared are the UNIXish command line, Xwindows (UNIX),
MS-DOS, MS Windows, Macs, and the nipple.
In this context, "intuitive" can mean "instincutal", "based on instinct", or
"natural". A "nipple" is the part that makes five pounds of fat look good. :-)
HTH, HAND
I regret to inform that I am the "Bruce Ediger" of that quote. What's more,
I didn't really write that, and what's even more, it's wrong.
I read something like that quote in a usenet article a long time ago, circa
1995. A few days after I read it, I had occasion to re-use it in another
usenet newsgroup. I couldn't remember the quote exactly, or who wrote it
originally, so I wrote something like "Someone smarter than me once said
that the only 'intuitive' interface is the nipple. After that, it's all
learned."
Somewhere along the way, the "Someone smarter than me once said" got trimmed,
leaving me attributed, which isn't really correct.
I also regret to inform, that while catchy, the saying isn't true. My wife
gave birth to an infant son in January of 2001. The boy, while smart,
good-looking and possessed of a dazzling personality, had to learn to breast
feed. Other friends of mine say the same thing about their kids.
There is no intuitive interface, not even the nipple. It's all learned.
- Bruce Ediger, 2001