Think I'm an idiot?

The other day, minding my business while a friend used the washroom at a Barnes and Nobles, I spied a toy that made me angry. SHOCKER, I know, yours truly gets angry with inanimate toys.

Bear with me...

Do you see it?

Let me show you what I see.

This toy is essentially Honey I Shrunk the Legos. With your bony and arthritic or fat, sausage-like fingers you can assemble itsy bitsy Lego pieces... sorry... nanoblock pieces, into things that no one cares about. But the rip-off nature isn't the real problem. Heck, maybe Lego ripped off something else to become the Lego we know and love. No, what gets me is the "nano". 

Nano is a range in a scale of measure, and so is micro. Not to be overly pedantic, but if these blocks were nano in the meter size scale (and clearly that's the angle here), we wouldn't be able to build anything with them with our fingers. But the appropriation of "nano" to sell a toy doesn't really bother me either. It's the tag line - nanoblocks are "micro-sized building blocks". 

Hawhatnow?

Just. No.

Something that's nano is a fraction of what is micro. Sure, things can be described in a bunch of different length scales, but this is like saying a pint is also a 5 gallon keg. It's like saying a church house is also a cathedral. It's treating us like we're idiots by throwing sciencey (mathy) buzzwords at us in the hopes we find it cool to play with something that should be called, "tiny things you will lose all over the house," or "petroleum by-products made in China for your toddler to choke on," or "672 new crevices your dust can go".

And when I think of all the marketing meetings that they must have had over this, subconsciously thinking that basic math was something no one else cares about either. Or they thought we'd never notice.

Well I'm onto you, toy marketers. This idiot is gonna go dust off her Legos.