Rosetta Stone - Idiomatic Use

Idiomatic Use

The term Rosetta stone has been used idiomatically to represent a crucial key to the process of decryption of encoded information, especially when a small but representative sample is recognized as the clue to understanding a larger whole. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first figurative use of the term appeared in the 1902 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica relating to an entry on the chemical analysis of glucose. An almost literal use of the phrase appears in popular fiction within H. G. Wells' 1933 novel The Shape of Things to Come, where the protagonist finds a manuscript written in shorthand that provides a key to understanding additional scattered material that is sketched out in both longhand and on typewriter. Perhaps its most important and prominent usage in scientific literature was Nobel laureate Theodor W. Hänsch's reference in a 1979 Scientific American article on spectroscopy where he says that "the spectrum of the hydrogen atoms has proved to be the Rosetta stone of modern physics: once this pattern of lines had been deciphered much else could also be understood".

Since then the term has been widely used in other contexts. For example, fully understanding the key set of genes to the human leucocyte antigen has been described as being "the Rosetta Stone of immunology". The flowering plant Arabidopsis thaliana has been called the "Rosetta Stone of flowering time". A Gamma ray burst (GRB) found in conjunction with a supernova has been called a Rosetta Stone for understanding the origin of GRBs. The technique of Doppler echocardiography has been called a Rosetta Stone for clinicians trying to understand the complex process by which the left ventricle of the human heart can be filled during various forms of diastolic dysfunction.

The name has also become used in various forms of translation software. Rosetta Stone is a brand of language-learning software published by Rosetta Stone Ltd., headquartered in Arlington County, Virginia, US. "Rosetta" is the name of a "lightweight dynamic translator" that enables applications compiled for PowerPC processor to run on Apple systems using an x86 processor. "Rosetta" is an online language translation tool to help localisation of software, developed and maintained by Canonical as part of the Launchpad project. Similarly, Rosetta@home is a distributed computing project for predicting (or translating) protein structures. The Rosetta Project brings language specialists and native speakers together to develop a meaningful survey and near permanent archive of 1,500 languages, intended to last from AD 2000 to 12,000. The Rosetta spacecraft is on a ten-year mission to study the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko, in the hopes that determining its composition will reveal the origins of the Solar System.