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You'll be delighted to hear that traffic signals are called "robots" in South Africa.

• malkia 10y ago
  That itself reminded me, that the word "robot" comes from "robota, rabota" which means "to work, worker" in a lot of slavic languages (My native language is bulgarian). From the dictionary: robot, origin: from Czech, from robota ‘forced labor.’ The term was coined in K. Čapek's play R.U.R. ‘Rossum's Universal Robots’ (1920). https://www.google.com/search?q=robot+definition https://www.google.com/search?q=robot+definition
  • contras1970 10y ago
    Rossum is a riff on "rozum" which means reason (as in to reason about). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.#Origin_of_the_word https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R.U.R.#Origin_of_the_word
    • mrkgnao 10y ago
      "Thinker's Universal Workers"?