Icon for the Save button is still a floppy disk, despite the fact that Apple hasn’t sold a machine with a floppy drive for a decade.

UPDATE: Email from a DF reader:

I help out in an elementary school, sometimes in the computer lab, and always get a laugh out of how there is absolutely no way to convey to a bunch of 8 year old kids which button they should click to save without physically pointing it out or describing the one next to it.

Tell them to “click the disk” and they look around for a CD icon. Tell them to “click the floppy disk” and they laugh at the word “floppy.” The machines have floppy disk drives, but the kids have never seen them used.

(via Daring Fireball)

The closest I’ve come to getting a handle on all this is something painter Eric Fischl has talked about. Imagine calling two pets, one a dog, the other a cat. Asking a dog to do something is an amazing experience. You say, “Come here, Fido,” and Fido looks up, pads over, puts his head in your lap, and wags his tail. You’ve had a direct communication with another species; you and Fido are sharing a common, fairly literal language. Now imagine saying, “Come here, Snowflake” to the cat. Snowflake might glance over, walk to a nearby table, rub it, lie down, and look at you. There’s nothing direct about this. Yet something gigantic and very much like art has happened. The cat has placed a third object between you and itself. In order to understand the cat you have to be able to grasp this nonlinear, indirect, holistic, circuitous communication. In short, art is a cat.

From “The Whole Ball of Wax” by Jerry Saltz.

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A few other annoying trends:
• Close-up photography of flowers
• Unremarkable skies
• Fields of flowers
• Sloppy or pointless nature photos
• Pictures of a window (or windows) in the middle of a bare wall (what’s up with these, anyways?)
• Pictures like this (seriously, what’s the point?)

On second thought…  I confess.  The photos of windows bother me more than the leaves on the ground.  It’s always a plain wall – stone, wood, or what have you – and a window smack dab in the middle.  Sometimes the window is purposefully off-center, I admit, for that extra touch of artiness.  Either way, I’ve seen more than a number of these.  But why?