Sorting through my late wife's clothes prior to taking them to the charity drop-off, I found a shirt, 100% cotton, made in China. The label had a mass of those little laundry symbols, which I didn't understand, so I downloaded an explanatory sheet.
It seems that this cotton shirt, which has both black and white sections:
Points out that dark and white clothes should be washed separately; Demands to be hand washed; Allows no bleach; Allows no use of a tumble dryer.
There were one or two more, but that was enough. I'll let the charity worry about it.
I just ignore them and put them into a mixed wash programme. I do get annoyed with symbols. They are everywhere in instruction booklets and if you OCR said book to get the info out, where these appear are often blank or total garbage. I guess if you are sighted a picture is worth a thousand words, especially if you sell to loads of countries, but its of little use to me. I find them in Printer instructions, Washing machines and other consumer gear. I think I can cope with a little bloke holding an umbrella in the rain over an appliance, but one has to be able to see it first. Brian
Symbols are fine as long as people can identify what the symbol depicts, so you can then work out what it means. An umbrella over an appliance is fairly obvious, both as to what the symbol is (an umbrella) and what it means (keep dry).
But a lot of icons fail the elementary "WTF is that a picture of?" test, so you've not a hope in hell of working out what it means.
One thing that doesn't help is when the corresponding icons on the appliance and in the instruction book bear no resemblance to each other, as if the appliance maker has described his icon in words over the phone to the author of the manual ;-)
Try talking someone through a procedure when you are giving telephone support: "to save your document, press the icon that looks like a TV set but which is actually supposed to be a floppy disk with a label on it".
When there is a small finite set of pictograms which are always drawn identically (eg road signs), icons are fine. But when every manufacturer invents his own icons, it is very difficult: you have to look sequentially through the table in the manual for the one which most closely resembles the one on the appliance. I may be weird, but I'd rather have a foreign word (which I can look up alphabetically in a foreign dictionary) than have an impenetrable indecipherable icon.
I did wonder if ours had decided that the picture of an electric or diesel trains might have been a bit more ambiguous that it was a train, but the one in google maps is very obviously a train and not a car or plane or a person on foot.
Maybe ours has decided that the train is a bit close to a modern very square fronted bus or truck or something.
Indeed. The only things I wouldn't wet wash are leather and suede, but gentle sponging of a grubby spot might be acceptable for the latter. Even then, once it dries it can be difficult to get the appearance of the newly-cleaned spot the same as the surrounding suede. I would also be very careful with silk, but that's more to wash at a low temperature with gentle agitation.
Everything else can be hand or machine washed, with the main caveat being that if it's a first-time wash of a deeply-coloured material, it's best done on its own.
They're called Hieroglyphics and went out of use quite a long time ago! We invented alphabets etc. because they work better! Why manufacturers think they're better than writing I fail to understand.
Well-known symbols like those on road signs and the play/pause/rewind symbols on tape recorders, media players etc - those are fine. But more esoteric ones like those for washing labels and on washing machines themselves are a problem because you need to get past the "what does this icon depict?" stage before you can start to guess what it might mean.
Apparently when a study was done, this icon
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was widely misunderstood/ I've renamed the file from the site where I downloaded it, because the filename says what it means, though the actual name on the accompanying text was itself a mystery to a lot of people.
It is actually "muster point". Now the first problem is that a lot of people didn't know what "muster" meant. I see that some examples of the icon now use the text "emergency assembly point" instead, which is a much better term because it is not nautical jargon and is a word that non-native English speakers are more likely to understand.
This is discussed in
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Leaving aside the confusion of "Notausgang" in German (which means "emergency exit", as opposed to "this is not the emergency exit - find another way out"!) I prefer foreign-language words to icons *if the icons are not immediately obvious*.
I fitted a close coupled toilet the other day and that only came with picture instructions. It was assembled using common sense as some of the pictures made no sense. In many cases there were two pictures showing the correct and incorrect way of fixing (one with a big tick and the other with a no entry sign). However, in one case two IDENTICAL pictures one with the tick and the other indicating the wrong way of fitting!
Having had problems in the past with toilet seat fixing that don't hold the seat secure I elected to to discard their supplied blind hole fixings in favour on an alternative. The toilet doesn't actually have a blind hole for the seat fixings and there was access underneath for tightening.
On the industrial estate where I used to work there were many muster point signs outside of the various places of work. Just because there was a sign it didn't mean it was YOUR muster point in the event of an evacuation.
So maybe -- just an idea -- the solution is to introduce a *symbol* so that English speakers don't understand German as a hotchpotch of German and English? And that fits in with a set of rules that allow one to deduce what a sign means, even if one hasn't seen a particular combination?
I remember when that symbol was still fairly new, a safety organisation criticised it on the grounds that it showed someone *running* to the emergency exit which could encourage people to stampede, and run heedlessly and without care for others, rather than walking briskly but safely. You just can't win ;-)
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