Comment by intrikate
13 days ago
This is a really interesting thing to think about. English is my mother tongue, and I'd never really considered this, it's always just been part of the language.
If I ask my partner to turn the volume "up," I am asking them to literally move the volume knob "upwards" towards the maximum limit. The physical motion doesn't literally track with televisions and remotes, for example, but you're still moving (turning) the volume upwards towards maximum.
That's how it shakes out in my head? You're moving something upwards towards the maximum. More is bigger, bigger is up.
> More is bigger, bigger is up.
In Chinese the past is "up" and the future is "down".
Having gotten that into my head, I now get annoyed by the hotkey controls for mpv, which use up arrows and page up to skip into the future and down arrows and page down to skip into the past.