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Batt, James R. (ed.) / Wisconsin Academy review
Volume 20, Number 4 (Fall 1974)
Hove, Arthur
Sending and receiving: On finding one's way, pp. 30-31
Page 31
mandu. As a result, the names of Baedeker, Michelin, Fodor, Tem- ple Fielding, Egon Ronay, AAA, and -even Kilroy have become a part of the regular travel lexicon. The guidebook, therefore, gets tossed into the suitcase along with such other essentials as passport, toothbrush, and traveler's checks. Even with all the maps, the guide books, and the scientifically engineered superhighways, it is still a sure bet that a significant percentage of drivers sailing along the freeway in an unfamiliar city will miss their turn. The natives all know where they are going. They weave in and out of the traffic like frolicking dolphins. The stranger, in the meantime, has to keep an eye on the road and glance at the side and rear view mirrors while anxiously searching for the turnoff sign. If he is lucky, the stranger will know in advance what the sign says and be in the correct lane when he has to make his move. Missing a turn usually means spending a few extra mo- ments in a kind of highway purga- tory. It means an unplanned and often unwanted s c e n i c tour. It means traveling miles down the road before you can double back. And then there is a whole new set of signs to deal with on the way back. Some of the signs are getting simpler. In a few years the famil- iar "No Parking" legend will be gone from the landscape, this particular remonstrance replaced by a letter P with a red slash through it. I'm sure you get the message and will soon grow to recognize that an arrow doubled over in pain with a similar red slash through it means "No U Turn." These new ideograms which are replacing our custom- ary road signs have long been familiar to European drivers (even though the signs don't help them drive any better). The ra- tionale behind the signs is that they are instantaneously recog- nizable. The message they project travels a split-second faster from the eye to the brain which then signals your muscles how to react to a particular situation on the road. This ideogram is particu- larly effective because it requires no translation. It means the same thing in Spanish, Croatian, Swed- ish, and Urdu. Similar signs have been a fa- miliar part of the landscape of Western Civilization since the Mid- dle Ages. Few people could read in earlier centuries, but most could recognize that the picture of a pair of scissors meant a tailor's shop, or that a scale indicated there was a moneychanger nearby. Modern consumers are familiar with the barber pole, the mortar and pestle of the pharmacist, and the three balls hanging over the door of the pawnshop. Perhaps the modern personification of the tradesman's sign can be found in the descrip- tion of the optometrist's logo that appears in The Great Gatsby: . . . above the gray land and the spasms of bleak dust which drift endlessly over it, you perceive, after a moment, the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckle- berg. The eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleberg are blue and gi- gantic-their retinas a r e one yard high. They look out of no face, but, instead from a pair of enormous yellow spectacles which pass over a non-existent nose. Business and industry, as a nat- ural evolution from medieval com- mercial practices, have carefully cultivated a "corporate image" through the use of a readily identi- fiable logotype-a commonly iden- tifiable sign which appears on products, p a c k a g e s, stationery, and product advertising. Finding one's way is not always a case of using signs to pick your way through a landscape. Direc- tions are often given to accom- plish other goals. There is the cliche example of the beleaguered father confronted with a set of sub- literate instructions and a boxful of parts to a swing set. Invariably, as the standing joke goes, father will not be up to the challenge. The density of the prose in the instruc- tions defeats him-unless he hap- pens to be a mechanical engineer who doesn't need the instructions in the first place, or a bureaucrat who is used to dealing with prose that has a high cholesterol content. Confronted with the instructions, father can hardly identify Flange B, much less ascertain where it is supposed to fit together with the mass of parts that lie before him like the bones of a strange animal. But it is not just children's de- vices that can stymie the potential do-it-yourselfer. More and more things come disassembled these days. It's supposed to be cheaper that way. Everything from wheel- barrows to dining room hutches comes in pieces that are to be put together in a logical sequence so that when complete they will look like the item pictured on the front of the box, or like what you saw on the showroom floor in the store. Then there is the case of the TV commercials wherein we see the industrious ingredients of patent medicines racing along the high- ways and byways of your body. The more effective the pills, we are told, the faster their relief-giving ingredients will course to the troubled parts of your anatomy. The ingredients know their way. You can watch them on the tele- vision screen as they dash to put out the fire of a fever, relieve the throbbing pain of a sinus head- ache, or neutralize the discomforts th at accompany overindulgence of food and drink. If you are a literalist, it will be difficult to ever again swallow an aspirin or a cold capsule without subsequently experiencing a tin- gling sensation as those animated little granules move along your veins and arteries on the way to realize their destiny. If this makes you squeamish, then you may have some trouble following an- other television exhortation and let your fingers do the walking through the Yellow Pages. And then there is the response that a Ms. Gloria Monday once received from a surveyor whose equipment had broken down as he was making measurements for a roadway that would take people to a previously inaccessible area. When asked why he had sus- pended work, the reply was ob- vious and descriptive of a univer- sal reality. "Sick transit Gloria Monday." 31
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