WORDSPEAK
Words in pictures
ANAND
I ONCE walked into a women's toilet because the sign next to the entrance was small and showed a pictogram that, unless looked carefully at and analysed, appeared to be for men's toilet. The sole woman inside washing hands at the sink politely and courteously showed me out.
Pictograms are symbols or drawings that represent a concept or an object by illustration. These are drawn in a standardised way, omitting unnecessary details; the one that fooled me perhaps omitted too many details. Since the pictograms most commonly used are symbols on public toilets for "man" and woman", I may be just one of many who walk into wrong toilets in restaurants and airports everywhere.
Such confusion — this thought comforted me while I berated myself for not paying closer attention — might have occurred through centuries because expression of words and ideas through drawings is considered a forerunner of true writing. A pictogram that stands for a specific idea or meaning is an ideogram; one that stands for an individual word is a logogram. Early written characters were based on pictograms and ideograms; it is commonly believed that pictograms appeared before ideograms. Hieroglyphs are symbols in the form of pictures, which were used in some writing systems, especially those of ancient Egypt. If a mummy in some museum were to come alive today, echoing my mistake she or he might say, "Sorry, the hieroglyphs are not detailed enough: I am not the Pharaoh's favourite queen, but the doorman who was embalmed when the real queen's body couldn't be found."
Pictorial representation of statistics or data in a chart is a kind of pictogram. Standardisation of images is essential for a pictogram, which accounts for its universal meaning. A Canadian logopedist, Subhash Maharaj, came up with that idea in the early 1980s. A total of 1,120 have been designed so far. Others commonly seen include the laundry symbols on clothing tags, chemical hazard labels, and those used outside a packing case: a drinking glass stranding on its base indicates which side is up, the same shown as broken indicates that the contents are fragile, and an umbrella indicates that the package should be protected from getting wet. This last set of pictograms are amazingly effective, all the packages I received with these pictograms had been soaked in rain and had all the contents broken.
In countries or regions were two or more languages are used, the typical traffic sign is very often a pictogram with no writing on it. This is the case for much of Europe and several parts of Canada where I live part of the year. India may be the ideal place for using these pictograms, except, few are visible outside big cities. Drivers in India have their own interpretation of a pictogram near hospitals, that of a horn with a cross over it: no one forgets to sound their horn. Another common pictogram, that of a lit cigarette with a cross over it invariably has a live person smoking next to the sign.
Pictograms are meant to replace language. I am sure they are useful for people with reading and writing difficulties, for the sick and the elderly when it comes to passing on important information on how to take medication, and for those who do not know a particular language. With the dawning of the Age of Aquarius in the 1960s and 70s, some trendy joints used to have a replica of the king and the queen from the playing cards on doors leading to men and women's toilet. That fortunately went out of fashion with the bell-bottoms. Another recent, surely ill advised, venture with creative pictogram-ing was to place an image of an Indian goddess on the door to a women's toilet; it was removed after the predictable furore.
Pictograms, like language, depend on culture — in some cultures where men commonly wear dress-like clothing a differently designed image might be needed for women's toilets. The purge of sexist words and images has crossed over into pictograms; the generic images are being made unisex, particularly where gender-specific information is not needed. Some years ago, certain feminist groups objected to the widely used pictogram of a man walking on the zebra line to indicate a pedestrian crossing. The image was changed to a stick figure, but it also lost its originality and distinctiveness.
But you and I cannot avoid pictograms even if we don't go out or don't travel. Those original, distinctive, and tiny computer icons showing files, folders, applications and devices are pictograms, and virtually every major computer operating system uses them. The creation of a good functional icon is now considered as an art form in itself, comparable to that practiced in the past in the domain of miniature painting by old masters such as Joseph Severn and Charles-Francois Daubigny.
E-mail the writer at anand@journalist.com
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