• Morse mapped letters to short/long pulses—a human‑parseable binary.
• Born in the 1830s–40s with Samuel Morse and Alfred Vail, optimized by letter frequency.
• Powered news, finance, railways, and distress signaling (⚠️ SOS).
• Lives on in amateur radio, assistive tech, and aviation IDs; teaches compression & latency thinking.
Look at a price tag and you’ll see a story disguised as a mark: $, €, ¥, ₹, ₺. Currency symbols are semiotic shortcuts—they compress state authority, trade geography, and printing technology into one glyph. They tell us who guarantees value and where that value circulates (see Currency symbol). 💱
Punctuation is interface. The hyphen (-), en dash (–), and em dash (—) are three tiny lines with big semantic jobs: glueing compounds, mapping ranges, and staging breath in sentences. We argue about Oxford commas; we ignore dashes—until they break something. 📝
Long before it grouped memes or movements, # lived quiet lives as pound sign, number sign, and octothorpe. It tagged weights, introduced phone-tree prompts, and sat on typewriter corners. Then social networks turned it into user-generated metadata—a folk taxonomy that routed attention at global scale. 🧭 (more…)
Few symbols carry more social pressure than the restroom icon. You’re lost, in a hurry, maybe navigating a foreign script, and you need a sign that translates instantly. That tiny pictogram has to be polite, inclusive, and foundable at speed. This essay explores how restroom icons became a global interface—from silhouette grammar to wayfinding orchestration—and why the best ones disappear into muscle memory. 🚻
When Ray Tomlinson used user@host for networked mail in 1971, he chose a character unlikely to appear in names. But @ already had centuries of work behind it—in bookkeeping, commerce, and measurement. Understanding those pre‑digital jobs explains why the symbol felt available for a new one (see At sign, Ray Tomlinson). (more…)
No other punctuation mark gets as much personality as the ampersand. Designers collect them, brands spotlight them, and sign‑painters treat them like a signature flourish. Yet the symbol began humbly: as a scribal ligature of Latin et—”and.” Over centuries, the mark split into styles, from the looping humanist forms to the rationalist figure‑8 constructions. (more…)