Comments on: Very interesting things and a quiz.

By: Eric Lund

Eric Lund — Fri, 11 Jan 2013 14:37:28 +0000

Oh, you mean that fat upward arrow on my Dell keyboard? (My Mac keyboard does not have that.) OK, I can see why someone Huxley’s age might think that’s a house. But then, I’m old enough to know firsthand why the shift key is called that: back in the days of typewriters, it literally shifted the mechanism upward so that the symbols on the lower half of the things that struck the ribbon–which is where the upper case letters and miscellaneous punctuation symbols were–would hit the ribbon, rather than the upper half, where the lower case letters and numbers were. So you have the fat upward arrow to remind you that you are shifting that big virtual mechanism upward.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 23:34:34 +0000

Haha

By: Marnie

Marnie — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 22:36:51 +0000

I think it’s the key with the vicodin addiction.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 18:39:39 +0000

Go look at the shift key. On many computer keyboards it has a little picture of a house on it. Or, at least, that is what Huxley sees when he looks at the keyboard!

By: Eric Lund

Eric Lund — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:20:55 +0000

The F and J keys are sometimes called “home” keys, because if you are a touch typist on a QWERTY keyboard, those are the default locations for your left and right (respectively) index fingers. Typically there will be some raised feature (dot or bar) on these keys so that you can find them without looking at the keyboard. But I presume that’s not what you mean. Likewise the one explicitly labeled “home”, the upper middle of a group of six (center of a group of nine on my Mac keyboard, which also has F13-F15 in that group) between the QWERTY portion of the keyboard and the numeric keypad and above the arrow keys for moving the cursor.

The key John describes above is usually IME called the Windows key. My Linux box (a Dell) keyboard has two of them: one in the location he describes and the other in the corresponding location to the right of the space bar. Some Linux distros may have a use for that key, but I haven’t found one (then again, apart from the X windows system I generally don’t use GUIs on *nix boxes).

I haven’t actually heard anything on a computer keyboard called the “house” key, at least in English. Perhaps that’s what you get by translating the “home” key to some other language and then back to English.

By: John Moeller

John Moeller — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 03:54:11 +0000

I’m going to say the one on the left between “Ctrl” and “Alt.”