I had always assumed, without ever having read or heard it anywhere, that the term “joystick” was a marketing thing of the video game industry, making reference to the fun and great time that you’ll supposedly have playing games with them. That would imply that comparable controllers for use with a single hand in applications other than video games (such as aircraft, or ships, or even some prototype cars that never made it to mass production) would have a different, more neutral name (which I thought would be “sidestick”). Recently, though, I have seen the word applied also in such contexts. So maybe “joystick” isn’t specific to video games at all and cam correctly and also in formal usage be used e.g. for aircraft? Is there an accepted etymology of the word?
I was hearing and using the term ‘joystick’ back in the very early 1970’s when flying a Fairchild PT-26. This pre-dated Pong.
Wikipedia says its first known use (as the control stick for aircraft) is in 1909, though they don’t give a real great cite. Joystick - Wikipedia
Etymology online says:
I associate the term “joystick” with aircraft before I think of video games. I remember hearing the term when I took flying lessons in the early '80’s.
Yep, definitely associated with a control lever in aviation from quite a ways back. Definitely predates video game controllers. I’m pretty sure it was the video game controllers named after the aviation type joysticks and not the other way around.
There are other levers in aviation sometimes called “Johnson”. Yeah, we made jokes about those, too…
Let’s not forget that many of the aviation cadets, in both wars, were barely out of their teens…
Don’t play with your Johnson when you are holding your joystick while going balls to the wall in the cockpit.
The word ‘joystick’ was used for the aircraft control device at least as far back as 1910, well before the invention of the transistor needed for video games. The video game version got itself from the aviation device, not the other way around. World Wide Words: Joystick
Some years ago I was assisting the police in obtaining a urine sample from a teenaged handcuffed male. He had waist chains with his wrists cuffed at his sides. I was pretty sure he could accomplish the task without help. I took him to the bathroom, gave him the sample cup and started to leave. As I left I asked him “Are you sure you can reach your Johnson?”
He said “My Johnson?”. I said “Yeah, your Johnson. That’s a medical term for a penis.”
Also change in acceleration over time is jerk and change in jerk over time is jounce. So a lot of j’s might come up in maneuvering.
I knew about “jerk”, but not “jounce”. Thanks.
I’ve always heard the fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position referred to as “snap”, “crackle”, and “pop”.
Which doesn’t matter for anything other than trivia lists, anyway, because they never come up in any practical application (even jerk is only very seldom relevant).
Jerk is quite relevant for postural control. If you stand on a train under constant acceleration, you can maintain balance by simply tilting your body at a constant angle. If the train starts jerking, then standing upright is more of a challenge!
Actually, it is doubly relevant since the inner ear has linear acceleration sensor (the otolith), and part of the neurons that carry otolith information to the brain have a phasic response, i.e. they encode a mixture of acceleration and jerk (these neurons are better at conveying high frequency signals, i.e. >1Hz).
Sure, jerk is sometimes relevant: That’s why I said “seldom”, rather than “never”. But it’s relevant much less often than acceleration is, and I’ve never heard of any situation at all where jerkdot (whatever you call it) would be relevant.
A dildo?