more thoughts on language

[erratio]

1. Today one of my coworkers used the most bizarre phrase I've heard in a while. She was asking me to do her section tomorrow and make it all look nice, since Wednesday is her day off. What she said was "could you make it all Mickey Mouse?" So.. short, animalistic and with a high-pitched voice? Possessed of its own fanclub? That would be one heck of a section at Coles..

2. From the book I'm reading right now, Darwin's Watch

Einstein invented general relativity in order to incorporate gravity into special relativity

Now my issue here is with the use of the word 'invented'. In my mind, the logic goes as follows: The laws of relativity etc describe the way the world works. Now, either the world does work in the way described, or it does not. If it does, then how can you say that you invented it? It's not so much inventing the law as discovering it. Inventing something implies creating something that was not there before. You can't invent gravity and you can't invent the way objects act as they approach the speed of light. Even saying that you can theoretically invent the equation to describe it seems ever so slightly off to me.
Mostly I think it's just a bad word choice on the authors' part, but one which was jarring enough to make me think "hold on a second..", and enough to make me more critical than usual of this particular pop science book.

Comments

[qkwozz.livejournal.com]

Perhaps if you think of it as inventing the concept, as opposed to inventing the phenomina.

The same argument could be applied to inventing a hammer. You could argue that hard metal on the end of a piece of wood would make driving slivers of metal into other pieces of wood easy, and it was always going to be so. But you could think of the situation as the invention of the concept of the hammer (initial idea), followed by the implementation of this concept (making it).