7

I am reading The Cuckoo's Egg by Cliff Stoll. Page 13 of my copy says:

Truly, the super-user is all-powerful: she controls the horizontal, she controls the vertical.

I am not familiar with this phrase. However, it is very similar to something I heard in a totally different place.

In the song "UHF" by "Weird Al" Yankovic (written as a theme song for his 1989 film of the same name) there is a line that goes:

Don't you know that we control the horizontal, we control the vertical too

The line in the song is relevant because the song is about televisions, which control a scanning beam to move horizontally and vertically across the TV screen.

I have only ever heard the notion of "control the horizontal, control the vertical" in the Weird Al song, and my attempts to search for this phrase online came up short. I looked for "to control the horizontal and the vertical" and got irrelevant hits.

The song and the book both came out in 1989 so it is unlikely that either got it from the other.

Is this phrase in common use? Does it have any particular meaning besides "having absolute control"?

Improve this question
3
  • As an additional example, here is a clip where Brennan Lee Mulligan calls GM of role playing games the horizontal and the vertical: youtu.be/plGNmsegcJc?si=xNB9KcGXZShIKxhq&t=286 Commented yesterday
  • 5
    "I [...] got irrelevant hits." Odd. I googled a couple of variations on "control the horizontal, control the vertical", and always several hits on The Outer Limits were at the very top of the results. This is the origin of the phrase. Perhaps you just didn't recognize that such hits were indeed relevant? Commented yesterday
  • 2
    @JohnBollinger I mostly saw information on land surveying. While I know nothing about surveying, it appears that horizontal control and vertical control are an important task in surveying. Unfortunately this is likely another case of the declining quality of search engines in recent years (I have heard they optimize for spending the most time with the search engine now, instead of optimizing for the fastest arrival at the desired result) Commented yesterday

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
40

These refer to or riff on the opening monologue of The Outer Limits TV show, which started in 1963:

There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. [...]

Text taken from the Wikipedia article, which explains in a footnote:

In the 1960s, television controls enabled users to adjust the dimensions of the image, even to the point of distortion (the horizontal and vertical), and also to cause the image to "roll" vertically; this was in order to allow sets to be fine-tuned to compensate for sometimes-wide variations in reception quality ... Such fine-tuning was phased out of western televisions in the 1980s and rendered obsolete with the advent of digital broadcasting.

I think the uses you found are basically one-off jokes; I don't think there is a standard meaning beyond making a reference to the Outer Limits monologue, and echoing the idea that someone is powerful or able to control something.

Improve this answer
11
  • 2
    Good point @EdwinAshworth, but it's a riff on a phrase, so I think the meaning can be fluid. Don't riffs usually mean "whatever it is used to mean in context" PLUS "see how I made a reference?" Commented 2 days ago
  • 2
    You could add to this by quoting the Wikipedia reference at 3: "In the 1960s, television controls enabled users to adjust the dimensions of the image, even to the point of distortion (the horizontal and vertical), and also to cause the image to "roll" vertically; this was in order to allow sets to be fine-tuned to compensate for sometimes-wide variations in reception quality. . . Such fine-tuning was phased out of western televisions in the 1980s and rendered obsolete with the advent of digital broadcasting." Commented 2 days ago
  • 4
    I am very satisfied by this answer - my question asking about common usage was, in hindsight, misguided. The fact that they are riffing off of a major piece of popular culture makes that aspect of the question void. Commented 2 days ago
  • 3
    This misses the very salient fact that for decades there were "control" knobs on every tv called the "horizontal hold" knob & the "vertical hold" knob, along with a "volume control" knob. These are the basis for the Outer Limits phrases. But you don't need to be referencing it to talk about controlling the horizontal & vertical, you can be just referring to the knobs & control. Commented yesterday
  • 5
    @philipxy Are you suggesting that the specific phrasing "We will control the horizontal... we will control the vertical" (or minor variation thereof) could be used without being a direct reference to the Outer Limits intro? Unlikely; the show's intro was a cultural touchstone in the '60s in the US, as much as "to boldly go" was. Commented yesterday
-18

I think that, whatever about CRT screen TV set adjustments, this phrase really relates to the strong influence of personal (horizontal) relations upon decisions by figures in authority and the agencies they administer (vertical).

Lobbyists play on this all the time. A personal favor to Senator X by business tycoon Mr Y (after being introduced by lobbyist Z at a charity foundation black-tie in DC) could well lead to amendments agreeable to Mr Y when forthcoming legislation theretofore problematic to the latter's business interests comes before Sen. X's committee . . .

We must not entirely dismiss either the longstanding association of the word "horizontal" with sexual relations, e.g. collabos horizontales who were mistresses of German officers in Occupied France 1940-1945 or the more recent allusion to sex as horizontal jogging.

Indeed the use of "she" as the subject of this phrase seems to point strongly towards a person using sexual favors to gain control of a situation.

Improve this answer
2
  • 16
    This is utter nonsense. The specific quote comes right after Stoll describes the implications of the intruder gaining superuser access. The use of ‘she’ here is an attempt to make the reader not think of all hackers as male, as was fashionable in the late 1980s/early 1990s. Commented yesterday
  • Yes, it relates to the fictional context referred to. But it also resonates with other allusions of the phrase in other contexts. Like somone saying towards the last stage of a project: "I love it when a plan comes together!" - this will echo the remark made by the boss of the A-Team. Commented 21 hours ago

You must log in to answer this question.

Start asking to get answers

Find the answer to your question by asking.

Ask question

Explore related questions

See similar questions with these tags.