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The pole and the stake
On going with the current, changing it, and what designers are asked to do
Japanese has an idiom, nagare ni sao sasu（流れに棹さす）: to put a pole into the current.
The sao is a long pole used to move a boat. The boatman plants it in the riverbed and pushes off, borrowing the force of the current to move forward.
So the idiom means riding the tide of the times, letting things move along well.
In Japan today, though, many people take it to mean the opposite.
In 2012, Japan’s Agency for Cultural Affairs asked people what the sentence “That remark puts a pole into the current” meant. 23.4 percent chose the original sense: to go with the trend and add momentum to something. 59.4 percent chose the other: to go against the trend and take momentum away from something.
Pushing a pole into flowing water. Perhaps the gesture suggests damming the flow.
But a stick driven into a riverbed against the current has a name of its own.
A stake.
