. and .. are quite intuitive the more I think about it, they're essentially acting as symbolic representations of the 'current' and 'parent' dirs as in, when we look at it from / :
/
|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|
/etc /bin /root /home /mnt /dev /usr
|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|--|
../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../ ../
As we see, each of the subdirectories hold a / prefix to them as we're used to seeing, and this translated to the subfolders having their ../ descriptor denoting their parent (I think of them as recursive pointers to parent dirs), where the parent holds ../ and child dir has a name like /..
and invoking
I don't know if it wasn't until the mkdir() syscall was added this approach took form. There was an earlier 'Aha, Unix!' thread where Ken had mentioned a similar thing, where invoking pwd gave only the /usr/name directory even if the directory had been changed with chdir, essentially stemming out of only the forked child changing dirs, when the cd wasn't built into the shell (this was in the PDP-11 when he was writing the initial set utilities like cd, ls)
Also, depending on the implementation of 'ls' we were to try this out today, these are bound to have their differences. The original syscalls on the PDP-7 had chdir,
swp: " system call dispatch table
jmp . " base instruction
.save; .getuid; .open; .read; .write; .creat; .seek; .tell
.close; .link; .unlink; .setuid; .rename; .exit; .time; .intrp
.chdir; .chmod; .chown; badcal; .sysloc; badcal; .capt; .rele
.status; badcal; .smes; .rmes; .fork
mkdir was probably in the works at this stage.
We should also touch upon the "cd -" as this one takes you back like a back button into the directory you were last inside, whereas the cd ../.. takes you up or down the hierarchy depending on the placement of the / and adding placeholders i.e directory names in place of the .. (dots).
Of course, only the creators can embark upon the design details of the hierarchical system and the reasons behind all the above and more.
Since you mentioned the word dd, the utility which serves me like none other for my frequent rewrites of images, it too has an interesting past, it seems like 'dd' was non-unixy in it's design approach, if I'm to believe the lores around, which leads me to think that this might have been another one of the many idiosyncratic naming conventions used back then. More on the dd stuff:
http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/D/dd.htmlPersonally, I just like to think of it in my head as disk-disk.