[From Rick Marken (930805.1900)]
I returned home from the delights of the CSG conference in a
philological kind of mood so I spent the day (I'm still on
vacation) tracing the origins of the word "control". It seems
that "control" comes from the French "contrerolle" which means
"counter - roll". A counter - roll is "a copy of a roll of
accounts" which was a list of accounting data (payments,
receipts, etc) that could be used as the "standard" against
which to compare the same data entered in another form. The
entries in a check book can be considered the "counter-roll"
against which we check the statement that the bank sends each
month.
So the origin of the English word "control" is in accounting,
not engineering or human oppression studies, as some might suspect.
Indeed, my wife, who is an accountant with no apparent interest
in control theory, has worked in a department called "control
dispersement" and once applied for a job as a "controller".
The "counter-roll" is obviously the equivalent of the "reference
signal" in the PCT model of living control systems. So the
origin of the English "control" (as verb or noun) emphasizes one
fundemental aspect of controlling:comparison of a variable to a
reference standard. In accounting, accounts (the controlled variable)
must be compared to a reference standard representing the "correct"
state of those accounts (the counter - roll).
I think it is interesting that "counter- roll" is also listed as a verb
in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and it means "to roll in the
opposite direction". It is not much of a stretch to read this as
a description of the other fundemental aspect of control: disturbance
resistance. In this case, "roll" is a verb rather than a noun -- it
could represent the effect of a disturbance on a variable (like the
effect of waves on the orientation of a ship). Then "counter-roll"
is the countering effect of actions (like turning the rudder) on
the controlled variable.
Apparently, this "disturbance resistence" connotation of "counter- roll"
had nothing to with the etymology of "control". At least I could find no
evidence for it in the OED. The word "control" apparently comes from
the "reference standard" connotation of "counter- roll" in accounting.
This is interesting because I think some of the bad feelings that people
seem to have about the word "control" are based on the "disturbance
resistence" connotation of the word. "Control" implies working against
people, "countering" their freedom to "roll" as they wish. I think people
like the idea of "standards", "ideals", and "goals" (all synonyms for
"reference signal") -- and in this sense the original meaning of "control"
as "reference standard" was very pleasant. Unfortunately, when we try to
get human behavior (instead of human accounts) to match our "counter- rolls"
(reference signals) we must go to some rather extreme lengths to counter
the direction that such behavior might be inclined to roll. So our
"counter-rolls" (disturbance resistence) can become quite ugly when
applied to human behavior.
Ain't philology phun.
Best
Rick