Minutiae of the Road

Semiotics involves the study not only of what we refer to as ‘signs’ in everyday speech, but of anything which ‘stands for’ something else. In a semiotic sense, signs take the forms of words, images, sounds, gestures and objects. Contemporary semioticians study signs not only in isolation but as part of semiotic ‘sign systems’ (such as a medium or genre). They study how meanings are made and how reality is represented… .”Not only are words signs but also gestures, images, non-linguistic sounds like the chimes of Big Ben. Obviously devices (such as flags) created by man in order to indicate something are signs, but so are, in ordinary language, the thread of smoke that reveals a fire, the footsteps in the sand that tells Robinson Crusoe a man has passed along the beach, the clue that permits Sherlock Holmes to find the murderer.”
(Umberto Eco, Times Literary Supplement. 1973)