good old days when the remote control was a puzzle

it occured to me very late, as in, around these days, that when i was growing up, the buttons of household appliances -stereos, tv and video remote controls, telephones- were labeled in english. even before i spoke english, play, stop, rewind (rew), record (rec), fast forward (ffwd) were part of my vocabulary - even though i didn't know what some of them stood for. for instance, take ffwd. Unless you're familiar with the term 'fast forward', you are never going to be able to decipher this one. and when you have to tell someone to press that button, what do you say? or the speaker phone button on our old telephone. that one confused everyone in the family. but we didn't realize this. it was a given that these appliances weren't made in turkey, and therefore they couldn't be in turkish. and even if they were made in turkey, there was a good chance they were being exported as well (you don't really think that far when you're 10, but you get the point), so they had to be in a universal language like english.
and how did i come across this trivial blast from the past? well, i recently saw a remote control. the buttons were in turkish. i was very surprised that it was labeled in turkish and i asked myself why. and then i remembered the way i grew up. i found out very late in life what ffwd stands for, and some people never do. go figure.

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