The word ruQ "control manually, by hand" should also be considered in conversations involving raQ. There is no canon explaining the difference between the two, but suppositions exits that ruQ is a type of raQ or that ruQ specifically refers to controlling devices (as opposed to objects). Message From Okrand: raQ and ruQ are similarly defined. The difference is that ruQ is more likely to be used when the handling alters the configuration of the thing being manipulated and raQ is used when the thing being handled doesn't do anything if it's not being handled. So one can raQ a betleH, meaning move it around in various ways, but the betleH by itself isn't doing anything. Indeed, one may raQ any (non-powered) hand tool. By extension, raQ is also used for creating a work of art, since the clay or stone or whatever just sits there until the raQwI' (so to speak) comes along. ruQ, on the other hand, refers to controlling or handling something that can or may do something on its own (or due to some source of power), but the manual intervention causes it to do something else or behave differently. So if your robot vacuum cleaner starts wandering off in a direction you don't want it to go, you could ruQ it to get it back on track (by, say, picking it up and reorienting it). If you manually adjust something, that's ruQ, since you're manually determining or changing what the thing will do or how it will do it. You don't ruQ a betleH — unless, I suppose, someone has come up with an adjustable betleH of some sort. (If one were to ruQ a work of art, that would suggest that the artwork is manipulatable in some way, like kinetic art that has to be set up in a certain way to work properly and can, in theory, get out of adjustment or malfunction.) Finally, raQ, rather than ruQ, is used when manually controlling a ship because the person doing the controlling or manipulating is dealing with controls — switches and buttons or those holographic things they use on "Discovery" – but not the things that actually make the ship go or move in a particular way. If you manually control the thrusters by pushing a button or two (as opposed to letting the computer take care of things), that's raQ; if you manually control the thrusters by physically doing something to them directly (yanking a thruster component or twisting something or banging on something), that's ruQ. SEE ALSO: SeH control (v) SeHlaw control panel, console (n)