Letters are not iconic signs; they’re arbitrary symbols we trust.
- Public Works
- Sep 22
- 2 min read
This food for thought started when I accidentally stumbled upon a story about a 9-year-old prodigy taking college-level neuroscience classes. Particularly when I read that he started reading at the age of 2… he says he picked up the words naturally. It made me wonder how we recognize symbols, and why we trust their meaning.
Letters are symbols; they are a code whose meaning must be learned. A long time ago, they may have resembled something. Most, if not all, commonly used alphabets now function through social convention or cultural agreement.
Learned association, not a visual metaphor.
Letters are what we call “symbolic" signs; in contrast to “iconic”, which resemble what they represent, for example, a male/female silhouette bathroom sign, or an “indexical” sign, which points to something by connection—for example, a crossed cannabis leaf to signify no smoking marijuana.
Some people have exceptional pattern recognition. They notice recurring shapes, sounds, and contexts. It seems to come more naturally for them than others, like the 9-year-old prodigy in the story I read. But generally speaking, it’s a skill that can be practiced. If exposed to consistent visual-verbal pairings (like signs, books, or subtitles), they may intuitively map the symbol-sound through repetition. More practice, more understanding. This is the foundational logic of apprenticeship and education. The apprentice or student must be given the key to decoding the symbols.
If letters are arbitrary, then reading is not just decoding—it’s trusting a system of shared meaning. Symbolic signs allow for abstraction; they allow us to communicate complex ideas and point to concepts that are difficult to signal; they describe the shapeless. They let us count, measure, and imagine. A flag doesn’t look like a country. Is Jasper Johns' “Flag” a painting, or a symbol? A cross doesn’t look like God. But we feel their weight because we’ve invested them with meaning. Is the cross sacred because of its form, or because of what we’ve invested in it? Ironically, they’re meaning can easily be forgotten. We must remember what the symbol stands for. We must believe others will interpret them similarly. And we must share enough cultural ground for the symbol to resonate.
When we read, we enter a symbolic order.
Food for thought.
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