Unpinch

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Barbara from Dallas.

Hello, Barbara. Welcome.

Hi, Barbara.

Hi.

What’s going on?

Well, I have a question regarding a word for an iPhone gesture.

An iPhone gesture? You mean like, gimme, gimme, gimme?

Well, there’s a specific gesture that you need to enlarge an image on an iPhone, and I wondered if anybody had come up with a good word for that.

Do you have one?

I have an iPhone, and because I’m older, it’s hard to see the image sometimes or to read the words, so it needs to be enlarged.

And the way you do it is you put your tips of two fingers together, put them on the screen, and then slide them apart while you’re still in contact with the screen, and then the image will enlarge.

So it’s kind of like a pinch, but it’s the opposite of a pinch.

Well, what do you call it?

Well, I call it unpinching, but I was hoping that there was a more elegant word for it.

Unpinching, though. That’s nice.

Unpinching. This is very Germanic.

Barbara, you just came up with that on your own? Unpinch?

I did. I haven’t researched it, but I thought somebody must have come up with a more snappy word for it.

Unpinching is good, though. I think it’s a good choice.

You said that it doesn’t sound elegant, but I don’t mind it so much.

It’s straightforward. It doesn’t mean anything else.

That’s true. That’s true.

And, you know, there are different words.

Like you could say spread your fingers, but that implies a different motion to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about flick or whoop?

Well, flick is a different thing because you can flick things back and forth on the face.

Oh, I guess that’s true.

That’s right.

Yeah.

I’m a blackberry girl, so I wouldn’t know.

Oh, yeah.

How’s that stone tablet working out for you?

Cuneiform is alive and well.

Barbara, it turns out that a lot of people use unpinched for that same gesture that you’re talking about, where you take the two fingers and you spread them apart, and then the image that you’re looking at or the text that you’re looking at grows larger.

And it’s got some history behind it.

The multi-touch interface, which is what that’s called, where you have more than one finger on the touch screen, goes back decades.

And so this is something, this is a gesture and a movement that’s been very familiar.

And if you look in the brochures and if you look in the scientific papers even for this gesture, most people call it things like zoom out or unzoom.

And a few people, including Apple on their website, when they talk about the iPhone and the iTouch and the iPad, they call it unpinched in a few places.

But for the most part, most of the technical documentation and most of the users call it zoom out, which is less interesting, really, as a word.

I think I like unpinched better.

I do, too.

Well, zoom out isn’t as descriptive of the gesture itself.

Yeah, and the problem with zoom out is that you can zoom out just by hitting the negative magnifying glass on some interfaces on some machines.

Yeah. So Barbara, go forth and unpinch freely.

Okay. Thank you so much for your help. I appreciate it.

Our pleasure. Thank you for calling.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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