Sorensen Sez…Importance of Names
The recent “competition” for a name for the Syn-Aud-Con garage band gives rise to the importance of names in general.
One that comes to mind is the Squawker, which is of course the name for the mid-band radiator in a three way loudspeaker. I confess that I don’t know why we kept Woofer and Tweeter but left Squawker out although the name does seem to carry an inference of harshness whereas Woofer seems solid and “foundational” and Tweeter comes off like the tune of little birds wafting on whatever it is that little birds waft on.
What, for example, would have happened if we had used first names for some of the units we use? Would you be content calling one cycle in a wave-train a Heinie? You’d be constantly running the risk that, while discussing electronics, someone would hand you a beer.
I can see that a unit of resistance called a George would be ok but easy to mix up with people in the railroad industry.
Current could just as well be measured using a term called the Andy but help us all if we tried to use Ampere’s middle name. I ask you guys, could you report current this way: “There are now 3.2 Marie’s of current flowing.” Well? Could you?
An Oersted could as well be a Hans but I’d probably have problems with reporting fluxivity in Gilberts as “the Bill.” Of course using the Weber always seemed to me to have more to do with grilling out than with magnets.
Can I consider walking into Radio Shack on my way to Europe and asking for an adapter to convert 220 Allisandro Euro-juice to what we use in the US…120 Allisandro power? Could we shorten it to being the “Al” without getting into politics? “Go get me some Al-and-a-half batteries.”
There might be a landmine on the road to microphone calibration if we have to call out the units as Blaising. I can see that might lead to a truly unfortunate play on words.
Screwy as it might seem the French get the prize for sanity on this one. They invented the metric system and gave most things therein names that don’t relate to people. That said we can still use terms like kilo and milli so we’d get a milli-Allisandro and a kilo-Bill…not to be confused with the movie.
The bottom line is that the names of things are often just as arbitrary as are some of the values chosen as calibration standards. For example, 0.776 Alisandro’s across 600 George’s as one value of the dBm…or should I say the deci-Alexander, milli-James’s.
I think this is the place where the beer figures prominently in the equation. At least I hope so.