Somebody claimed that “all wire is directional”. That is nonsense, but I can see where people who don’t know better would get that idea: they heard it from someone who heard from someone else, who saw how it’s done with balanced cables in pro audio, where convention is to ground the shield at the side which connects to the signal source and to “lift” the shield ground at the other end to prevent a ground loop from occurring. This effectively makes the cable assembly directional.
The people who think that because it’s done like that in one application don’t understand the rationale, and just make things up to try to impress others. It’s like the reason why some people floor the gas pedal on their car just before they shut off the engine. They think they need to do that because they saw someone once who did the same thing, not knowing that they were really doing it to kick the fast-idle off so the engine wouldn’t ping and knock after the iginition was turned off.
And so so we have this phenomenon of people blindly doing things due to information that they interpret incorrectly. Some psychologists refer to it as “broken telephone syndrome”. Neat eh?
