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How the Bracket Came to Be
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By James Monahan
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The word bracket is not commonly used in everyday language. Onemay go through a full life and perhaps never even get to use theword bracket. This may lead one to the conclusion that the wordbracket is not quite that useful. On the contrary, it's morecommon than one realizes and perhaps more useful than firstrecognized.
Volt in
Among several synonyms of the word bracket is a very commonword--group. There are groups everywhere, at any given point intime and space. This is a direct result of people'spredisposition to label and organize. When a person or thingsare put in a group, it is therefore put in a bracket.
Despite the word bracket and group being synonyms though, it isnot common to use the word bracket to describe a peer group forinstance. It sounds funny to say, "This is my peer bracket".
Therefore, the use of the word bracket must be utilized onlywith certain groups.
Reproduce and use
We learn multiplication in grade school and incidentally, thismay very well be one's first concrete encounter with the conceptof a bracket.
On the blackboard, the teacher will illustrate objects inside abracket to visually explain the principle of multiplication. Inthis case, we see objects grouped into brackets. The teacherwill separate the same apples into different sub groups andenclose them in a bracket to keep the same apples apart.
Souk for the soul
Outside of the classroom illustrations, a bracket is also usedto group things into categories. It is used for instance inMarketing to categorize a target market or in plain words, agroup of people who should buy a particular brand.
This is the way for brands to know better than to selldisposable diapers to a teenager whose sole pre-occupation areboys and the latest fashion.
The super sorter
A bracket is then used to divide and group a market to makemarketing efforts easier and more focused. So that the groupthat is most likely to be the buyers are further sorted intobrackets of age, gender, socio-economic class, and so forth.
A bracket is very valuable to marketing as this decides the waysomething is sold and bought. Imagine a world withoutbrackets--everything would be so random and arbitrary.
As first established, it is human nature to label and organize,so much so that it tends to become an obsession. Take beer forinstance. There are several types of beer under one umbrellabrand. There's the light beer for people who don't like theheavy feeling of booze but want the same buzz. Then there's thebeer with the stronger alcoholic content for the hard coredrinkers. There's the diet beer to follow the latest lowcarbohydrate diet fad. Then there's the plain regular kind forthe plain old regular type folks.
All those types of beer to choose from, thanks to the thebracket.
Let there be light
According to the Bible, in the beginning there was nothing. Thenfrom nothing, came light and we could see everything and thencame the need to identify and segregate.
Without labels and categories, all things far and wide wouldjust be the same, with no identifying differences. There will beno need for several types of beer that in the end will just makeyou drunk no matter what type it is. No need to first divide thesame apple illustrations on the board only to multiply themtogether later.
Thus, the bracket was invented.
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