Upon becoming frustrated with the enigmatic glyphs on the controls of his smartphone, my dad thought of the icons on the buttons in a particular computer program:
"In Unigraphics [a jet-engine-scale CAD program], a product I used to support, we have over a thousand symbols. Years ago, mankind invented phonetic writing so we wouldn't have to remember thousands of symbols, and now we're back to systems where we have to remember a thousand symbols!"
Having just finished a class on the era of civilization in which writing developed, I was highly amused. :)
That's hilarious. Just tell him the Chinese don't have a phonetic alphabet, and they're doing way better than the generally English-speaking world these days, so smart phone symbology is simply a way of us attempting to catch up to those whose written word is based on memorization of a thousand symbols. :)
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