high/low, on/off, and other flighty metaphorical entities

Speaking of unexamined cultural assumptions– such as the notion that a number “goes” in order from most to least significant digit-- all of the light switches seem to work in reverse here. As in, the light is on when it’s in the down position, and off when it’s in the up position. This feels wrong, as if there must surely be some real, physical justification as to why up-on/down-off is the correct way for a light switch to work, which of course there isn’t.

Which reminds me of this document which showed up on my RSS reader a few weeks ago: Musical Pitch is Not “High” or “Low”, about different metaphors for pitch. Which was the first time I’d seen it suggested that the idea of high and low pitches is a metaphor; it’s so deeply ingrained in Western musical culture that it feels as if it must be a literal description of physical reality.

And sure, high notes are “high frequency”– but then also, they’re “low period,” so why not that definition instead?1 High notes seem “high” if you play an on-the shoulder string instrument because your hand is closer to your face… but then, if you play a between-the-legs string instrument, high notes have your hand closer to the ground. Vocalized, “high” notes feel higher in the body– but that’s because the only piece of objective physical reality at play here is that shorter objects produce “higher” pitches, and in the context of singing that translates to a higher feeling in the body. If you wanted to map shorter vs. longer objects to a vertical axis, though, a reasonable way to do so would be to stand them up on the shared reference point of the ground– in which case the terminating point of a shorter object is lower to the ground than the terminating point of a longer one, which is higher. And indeed, several cultures and studies on the list do indeed use the high/low metaphors in that other, “reversed” fashion.