Pictographic semantics

Well, now that the bleeding has finally stopped, we may begin our discussion of meaning extraction in the phenomenon of language.

But perhaps first, an aside, as alert readers may be wondering, 'What in God's name has she done to herself this time?' Whereas courteous and concerned friends will think, 'Oh, dear Lord, I hope she doesn't lose a limb or have to have a skin graft.' Well, to ease minds and continue to provide amusement for those people who miss seeing me bust it by toppling off my 3-inch high flip flops (what devious person invented those, and what demented soul decided they should ever be a fashionable statement?), this evening upon my return from a meditation class with Katharine, which was supposed to calm me down, untense my shoulders and, I rather hoped, make me stop grinding my teeth slightly, a piece of fairly heavy masonry decided it was both the time and place to crash upon my (fortunately shoed) toe and break itself in half. (Isn't it good how I utilised language to blame the inanimate object here? Stupid brick heading on stupid rubbish area containment wall in front garden in the dark.) Oh, the pain instantly began, but being the brave soul, no sound other than an 'ooomph!' was made, peace and calm showed only a slight diminishment, and I continued to angrily throw the rubbish onto the pavement -- as our flat seems to be the only one to do this. Admittedly, my intention in all this was not destructive or malicious and so does not contradict the calming instructor this evening... Anyhoo, I limped inside muttering a not-so-happy song, and was absol. shocked, along with Steffi, upon taking off my shoe and sock that my toe was rather a pulpish mess. (Happiness has turned to intense annoyance at this point.)

After 20 minutes holding ice on it (so v. glad bought clever multi-coloured triangle-shaped ice trays at IKEA as would have been forced to use Vienetta otherwise and licking one's feet from chocolate isn't really appealing), the oozing seemed not to be planning on stopping any time soon. So, what should one do in this situation? We call our Papa! And we are so pleased he is home! And he tells us that pressure comes before ice -- for future reference, I have now made up a brilliant mnemonic device, pi, representing pressure before ice. Hoorah for mnemonic devices conceived in moments of annoyance and great pain and with assistance of Papas.

Status at moment: toe is bandaged and have taken extra measure of taping it with rather an excessive amount of tape firmly to my second toe. There is a dull throbbing. I believe I shall be forced to sit around and knit and read quite a lot over the next few days. Oh, and fill in forms and toodle about online. And drink tea. And eat Gingernuts.

Now! Back to semantics. (My goodness, Jasper and Carrot kind of smell... hmm.) Relative to the covering of the history of writing this week, the illustration above represents a pictogram, a picture used to represent meaning. (I did have a pretty good rant of intellectual-sounding absurdity to go with this, but the smashing of an appendage has had negative effects on my logic and cleverness)

Whilst this communication device originated in earlier cultures (separate from the phenomenon of art, I might say, as artistic events are usually a one-off and not repeated in any sort of systematic or meaningful way -- although there could perhaps be an argument about Mona Lisa or Andy Warhol items 3,000 years from now, and wouldn't it be interesting to know how that will be analysed? But I digress.), there are quite a lot of instances of this around us. Now, it is unclear to me if this sign has been photo-shopped, as the file forwarded to me from Jeremy (one of the Intro to Lang lecturers) was pretty small... But relative to my intense amusement at signage, such as the warning against high voltage where the person is being violently electrocuted with a lightning bolt above the chest or the warning at castles for dim light where the guy looks as if he is suffering some painful intestinal disturbance , it felt right to share it on the blog. There were some funny interps in my head earlier, but now I just want to climb into my bed and can't be bothered. Perhaps tomorrow, we can examine the extra meanings able to be encoded with an alphabetic system -- although for Mama Bear, may not be possible due to necessity of censorship :) hee hee hee.

SOOOOO, anyone may take a shot at posting an accompanying line to the sign. And respondents should post lines by following the link just below to 'Post a Comment' so as to let everyone see their offering. Don't just email me with them, because then you won't be as famous.

And anyone who didn't get the pictogram interpretations of what to do in the event of terrorism, you should email me and I will send them on. There are quite too many for me to post them all on here. But they are riotously funny.

Why have I just been invited to join the Wild Web Cam group on MySpace? What is wrong with people?