Wayfinding is an entire discipline that’s as much physical as psychological. Have you ever been at an otherwise unfamiliar airport but were able to get from the door to the gate without wondering if you were going the right way? You’re heading for Gate B19, and every so often, you see a sign showing Gates B10-24 are ahead, so you get that reassurance you’re on the right path. It’s a whole science of color coding, shapes, typefaces, frequency of repetition, etc.
Bad wayfinding is just irritating. A few months ago, I was at a hotel. My room was 714. Take the elevator to the 7th floor and just outside the elevator lobby, there’s numbers on the wall. <--- 701-712 718-728 -->
Well that’s just dandy! Where’s my room? After a little wandering, I find a stub hallway around a corner with 713-717 -->
between rooms 708 and 710.
Ooh, I have a good one! “Colorway,” especially when “theme” or just “color” would suffice. I don’t need to know what “colorways” you have available for my xbox controller, or my Firefox browser. Just tell me what colors you have or what themes I can install. Calling it a “colorway” makes it sound like you paid too much money to some pretentious designer. Thanks.
“I agree with that.”/“I disagree with that.” That’s not how one begins an argumentative essay in your final examination. It’s especially not the way one begins said essay when there is more than one prompt from which to choose for the essay question, nor does that one sentence constitute an opening paragraph for that essay.
“On the other hand.” Yes, that’s with a full stop aka period. This is not the way to begin every point paragraph of one’s essay. It is definitely not the way to begin the very first point paragraph. Here is a nifty hint: if you find yourself writing “on the other hand” more than once in one essay, you are no longer presenting yourself as human. I think the record number of “other hands” used in one purported essay I had to mark is ten. I have no idea what species has eleven hands.
Of course I realize the only reason the students (and it is not an insignificant percentage) do this is because they were taught to make these mistakes. The irritating part, besides the nonsensical bits, is I, along with my fellow foreign teachers here, do our best to teach them out of that, but to no avail. The problem is the wrong way is reinforced by the private after-school teachers the students’ parents hire. Those teachers are more expensive so, obviously, they must know English better than our school’s English teachers.
Granted that wayfinding is a science. Done well it’s magic; done badly it’s a headscratching clusterF***.
My objection upthread is solely with the clunky term, not with the importance of doing it right.
I have been exactly as bufflaoed as you in hotels chasing down my room. I recall one similar hidden stub hall at the airport Mariott in MEX. Growl!
Just tonight I experienced some horrifically bad “wayfinding” = directions. I was at JFK and tired and hungry after a long workday needing to get from my employer’s terminal to the on-airport hotel near another terminal. Which terminals I knew were connected by a circulating people-mover / train. If only I could find the route from my terminal’s customs/immigration to the train, take it to the correct stop, then find my way from the train to the hotel’s front door. I was alone, so any cues I missed would not be supplied by any coworkers.
It was an abject mess.
Lots of signage, but often of the sort that said “At this T-intersection, turn either left or right to get to the hotel”. I eventually tumbled to the idea that we had to change levels at several steps along the way. Each of which had elevators this-a-way and escalators that-a-way, since the whole people mover/train thing was a decades-later retrofit to the buildings, so the elevators and escalators were tucked in where they fit, not where they made any sort of sense. 100% of the signage was accurate, but simultaneously none of it was clear and unequivocal. Where there was a choice between elevators and escalators there were no words or icons to differentiate. Which would suck mightily for folks in wheelchairs, with strollers, etc, who need to pick correctly. I can do either, but prefer escalators as less crowded, COVID-ful, and slow. Satisfying preferences is nice-to-have. Satisfying need-to-haves is, well, need-to-have.
Then there was the point where there were two routes from exiting the people mover/train to get to the hotel. One was short and outdoors, while the other was vastly longer but indoors. Which can matter lots in NYC in winter or when it’s pouring rain. And each, of course, was on a different level. There was lots of signage pointing in both directions. But exactly zero signage which said “Left and up one level here = long but indoors, over there then right then down 2 levels of escalator or elevator = short but outdoors.”
I’d been here just once before a few months ago with several crew-fellows of indifferent skill and experience and our wayfinding then was a shambles with several false starts. This time I vowed to avoid the false starts of last time. Epic fail. And I navigate strange public spaces (and the outdoor natural world) for an Og-damned living!
Along the way tonight I ended up helping a dozen other folks who were lost, or at least not confident of their routing, find where they were going. Good for them; not good for the signage. We were all semi-lost, but I was less lost than they were. Talk about the one-eyed King!
This is the “state of the art”. If it really is “state of the art”, we need better artists.
I am not a native English speaker and it is not phrase/term, but g-dropping aggravates the hell out of me for no reason. Words like weddin’ waitin’ sittin’ grrr
There are a few phrases with redundancies that annoy me. I’m not sure that they “aggravate the hell out of me,” but they bug me somewhat.
“I thought to myself.” Unless you have the power to transmit your thoughts into someone else’s brain, like reverse mind reading, the “to myself” is unnecessary. Just say “I thought.” The phrase undoubtedly originates as a variation of “said to myself,” which is a perfectly cromulent expression that can be meant literally, or as a substitute for “thought.”
“May or may not.” Being inherently conditional, the word “may” implies its opposite, so adding “or may not” is unnecessary. (Or, if you want to be negative about it, “may” might be unnecessary, e.g., “You may not like this.”)
In expressions like, “I speak seven different languages,” the word “different” is unnecessary, because no one would say, “I speak seven languages, but four of them are English.” There are occasions when “different” conveys useful information, such as, “In our trip to California and back we drove through 12 different states,” implying you went through some of them more than once. But IMHO, most of the time that “different” is used is such phrases, it is unnecessary.
As a matter of the dictionary definition of “may”, you’re 100% correct. But the whole point of phrases / idioms is that they carry meanings & connotations above and beyond the mere definitions of the words they contain.
Using “may” (or “may not”) separately inherently expresses some favoritism for one option and therefore some skepticism for the other. The formulation “may or may not” neutralizes that; the writer is explicitly saying they take no editorial position on which is more likely to be true or better or whatever.
Similarly, “thought to myself” is an idiom that means more / different than the dictionary words. The phrase sets the context that your thinking was personal musing unrelated to an active conversation with others, and was also unprompted by others. The thought was totally off your own bat so to speak.
Something I hate seeing is “wanna”, “gonna” etc written. People pronounce things lazily all the time but we still seem to write the words properly, except for those.
And I can’t stand texting English eg “where r u going 4 lunch 2 day?”
