In Which We Look At The Meaning Behind Them

Hidden Imagery at the Letter Level

by RACHEL B. GLASER

When reading, a pair of eyes will take in the shape the paragraphs graph on a page. Then consider the linear spreads of sentences within. Then the words, how they’re fitted together in clumps, stuck together with articles. Few eyes zoom in to the letter level. Linguists think letter imagery ended with Hieroglyphs, that perhaps they are re-emerging as emoticons, but that’s just a joke a Linguist might tell her nephew.

For instance, the word “n-e-e-d-l-e” contains a lower case L that stands in as a needle, and “ee” the scream it conjures. In “pussy,” the “ss” become pubic hairs. The “oo” in boobs. The “a” “l” pairing in “small” and “tall” show height difference. The alphabet is twenty six shapes miming a play. “Y” has developed intrinsically to itself. Sticky, smelly, the “y” makes every word more itself, a runny “v.”

O works best to show space, as in the fore-mentioned “boobs,” plus “room” “tomb” “moon” “zone” “cone” “door” and “out.” The letter “o” is unique in that its design mimics it’s mouth shape. O is an exclamation and also the element symbol for Oxygen. O shows space in “obese” “orbit” “oblong.” O is used in things that spread out, “ocean” “oil” “orgasm” “omelet”.

These letter identities trace back pre-Latin, an early English decision to give letters their own lives. Early fonts were a size equivalent to 40 points. A word was its own two-dimensional expression. Early usage of the letter “i” used its dot to represent a round or small object. The words “ball” “dot” and “star” all included the letter, also “marble” “crumb” “speck” etc.

One will assume quite wrongly that word symbols evolved from cave-drawings and Egyptian picture language. Early cave drawings were not just lines and scratches, a shorthand.

On the contrary, early cave drawings were so rendered that they are more in line with photo-realism. A man could not draw a buffalo without crowding its whole body with baby hairs. The stick man was never arrived at in early drawings. Instead the cavemen and women marked their representations with jagged contours, celebrating their skeletons and the complicated shadows in light.

Dozens of other ancient letter identities have been lost besides “i”, the letter “j” used to be used in many tool names. The first word for fish hook was “mj,” “j” as hook and “m” the mouth of the fish. Besides the twenty six we still use, many have dropped from the alphabet. There was one letter lighter in shade which was used primarily for smoke and cloud words and other wispy phenomenon. One can correctly assume the alphabet will lose more. Letters like “n” and “m” might combine in an “n” and a half letter, the extra curve not quite reaching the ground.

In stride with letters, punctuation marks have also evolved from images and expressions. Parentheses hug their aside (like hands on ears) to quiet the statement and keep it still inside the sentence. The exclamation point was initially meant as a person so excited they peed onto the ground below them in surprise!

A question mark (?) shows another being’s confusion as they bend to discern what sort of puddle they stand over.

Rachel B. Glaser is a writer living in Massachusetts. You can find her website here. You can purchase her story collection, Pee On Water, here.

In Which We Try To Renovate Ourselves

Goodbye Bricks and Browns

by RACHEL B. GLASER

By the year 2004, even my mom used the word "retarded" loosely. Hollywood kept banking on American fears: AIDS/Aliens. New York was spilling into New Jersey. But through it all, The Port Authority Bus Terminal kept getting more and more beautiful.

The poolball sculpture was covered with dust. The 400 gates looked as close to dreams as reality can pervert. Archiac red tiles, dirty 1980s escalators; the bus terminal was a combination of brick and linolium, foggy glass and scratched metal beams.

Outside the abstract limbo of the gates, little kids called each other fags. Late-night cartoons had gotten so nilistic and revolting, reasonable people felt disgusting. No one believed the mad cow articles. They just ate hamburgers.

But classical music flowed through Port Authority. Toilets flushed on repeat. Twenty color-unbalanced televisions were stacked like an Nam June Paik piece, to assist with security.

Does all get redone in the "new" style? Penn Station looks like a titanium Powerbook (so does Newark airport, and all airports?) This phenomenon struck me most when I visited Reykjavik, Iceland and found it reminded me of Windows 97. It was a gorgeous interpretation of Windows. Windy, modern, organized, ducks. Any coldness was from the climate, and the shining reflections in glass.

Since 2004, Port Authority has renovated their 200s gates, doing them up in all white tile, like a bathroom, or a music video, a good set for spilled blood, or Mr. Clean cleaner (or both).

I guess the architects are at it again. Good-bye bricks and browns and yellows. I sense that white and silver will be prominent in the "new" design. What an empty aesthetic trick. Is all architecture parallel to our hearts fated to be replaced with "Millennium Sleek"? See you in the future.

Rachel B. Glaser is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Amherst, Massachusetts.

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