READINGS IN LANGUAGE

Using pictograms to give instructions, comics to explain evolution

We have two very interesting readings about language this week, the first about the international war over exit signs (you thought that this was a well-settled thing from as far as you can remember?), and the second about a scholarly explanation of the Theory of Evolution in terms of comics—yes, comics, as in Garfield and Spiderman!

In “The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man,” Julia Turner, writing in the March 8, 2010 issue of Slate.com, reports that the classic American exit sign—the bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T—is not the perfect, unimpeachable sign that we think it is. She points out that many people in the rest of the world actually think that this sign “is completely nuts,” so many of them prefer to use some other version of the ISO standard that goes by the informal name “the running man.” Then Turner raises this question: “Are the running-man advocates right? This battle over the exit sign has been brewing for 25 years now, and the little green guy is slowly making inroads in the States. But to understand whether he should triumph, we must first understand America’s skepticism toward pictograms and symbols…”

Read Julia Turner’s “The Big Red Word vs. the Little Green Man” in Slate.com now!

Writing in The Evolutionary Review, Brian Boyd, university distinguished professor in English at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, uses an analogy between evolution and the comics art form to explain the admittedly counterintuitive and bewildering theory that the various life forms originated from other preexisting types, and that whatever distinguishable differences they might have are simply due to modifications in successive generations. “Evolution lets us see comics, like almost anything human or even alive, in a panoramic context but also in extreme close-up, as close as a comics artist trying to grab readers’ attention in this frame or with that angle,” he says. “And it can zoom smoothly between these two poles. Evolution offers a unified and naturalistic causal system from the general to the very particular.”

Read Brian Boyd’s “On the Origins of Comics: New York Double-take” in The Evolutionary Review now!

RECOMMENDED READING:

If you found Patricia O’Conner’s Woe is I interesting and instructive, you’ll find her next book, Words Fail Me, as engaging and possibly even more fun reading. In Words Fail Me, she explains with her trademark humor the reasons behind the rules of written engagement in English, tackling such nuts-and-bolts problems as wrong word choices, misplaced modifiers, and comma splices. And she warns against being careless in your grammar ever. “You think nobody cares about grammar?” she asks. “The next time you post a message to an Internet newsgroup, try mixing up it’s and its, lie and lay, or there and their, and see what happens. The grammar police will be on your case, and you’ll get so many flames that your modem will smoke.”

Read the product details about Words Fail Me now!

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