Pigs and Pawnshops

ONCE upon a time there was a Fiji Islander. He was a very intelligent Fiji, and for some unfathomed reason he studied English in his island school. He learned how to pronounce bough and trough and tough and through, thorough and though and thought, because all of this was in his little grammar book and his teacher taught it to him.

But what he did n’t learn was how to interpret picture language, so when he came to America he felt very ignorant. For you cannot get along in the United States without a knowledge of picture language.

He came first to San Francisco. Being not only an intelligent but an affable Islander, he soon made friends with an American youth from Baltimore who undertook to show him the sights. Now this lad had never been to San Francisco before, but, as we shall see, he was justified in feeling himself a competent guide.

As they walked along one of the lesser business streets they came to a show window that contained the oddest conglomeration the Islander had ever seen. It was chock-full of watches and rings and pistols and a violin or two, a mirror in a gilt frame, a handsome set of chessmen, a coonskin coat, and a pair of mother-of-pearl opera glasses.

‘What an interesting secondhand store,’ said the Fiji.

‘That’s not a secondhand store — that’s a pawnshop,’ replied the guide.

‘I see you are familiar with this section of the city,’ said the Fiji.

‘Never saw it before in my life.’

‘Then how do you know this is a pawnshop? It does n’t say so. I can read p-a-w-n as well as anyone. I can conjugate I pawn, you pawn, he pawns, we p —’

The Baltimorean, having visions of this going on through all the moods and tenses, hastened to interrupt.

‘You can tell it is a pawnshop by the three balls painted on the glass.’

‘Oh,’ said the stranger.

From this moment on, the Fiji Islander began to lose the respect which he had formerly entertained toward his English professor. The instructor had taught him nothing of the pictography of t he white man.

In the week which the two spent in sightseeing, the foreigner learned many things. He learned that the picture of a pig meant ‘Hamburgers sold here’; that a papiermâché ice-cream cone was used instead of a sign; that black and white diagonals on the paving meant ‘railroad ahead’; that a bisymmetrical cross meant ‘medical aid’; that if the lower stem of the cross was lengthened it meant ‘church’ or ‘sanctity’; and that pictures of horseshoes and fourleaf clovers meant luck. But the symbol which delighted him most was a silver cock emblazoned on the bar of a restaurant. When the American explained its significance, the Islander was delighted.

‘Cock for cocktail! Sure, I could have guessed that,’ he said.

The Baltimore lad learned something, too, on these tours. At first his companion’s amazement at the current use of picture writing had seemed queer to him, but gradually he realized that civilized nations are more dependent on pictography than they know.

There is, he reflected, hardly an abstract quality which we have not symbolized.

If we see a building with a pair of balance scales carved in the marble front, we know that it is a law court, because scales stand for justice. A five-pointed star has come to mean excellence. When you think about it, an untrained savage would not even recognize this conventional design as a star. Stars don’t really look like that.

And what of our traditionally shaped hearts? Do they resemble a human heart? Suppose that someone, unaccustomed to our modern symbolism, should pick up an American comic sheet. He might recognize a male and a female facing each other, and see between them, apparently suspended in air, one or two of these queer little designs. Although the picture would convey little to him, any American child of grammar-school age would recognize the designs as hearts, and would read into the picture the fact that the characters were in the act of falling in love.

The comic sheets and animated cartoons, pondered the Baltimorean, are our most fertile sources of symbolism. When Jimmie Dugan in ‘Reg’lar Fellers’ has a bright idea, we know it immediately by the picture of an electric light bulb sketched above his head. Stars and singing birds tell us that the father of the famous Katzen jammer Kids has been knocked silly by a blow. And who has n’t seen Mickey Mouse register anger? Daggers dart in a direct line from his eyes to the object of his wrath. Since George McManus first published ‘Bringing Up Father’ the American public has been able to recognize a shrew by her rolling pin as easily as one could tell a king by his sceptre and crown.

As the youth pondered, more and more examples of pictography occurred to him: our political cartoons in which the elephant and donkey play a prominent part; trademarks whose significance we grasp without the use of the printed word; and road signs with their pictures of the curves ahead.

The Fiji learned as many of our pictograms as he could, and when he had returned in a state of bewilderment to his little grass hut the Baltimore lad went back to college and wrote a Ph.D. thesis called ‘Symbolism: Egyptian, Chinese, North American Indian, and Modern.’

He is now selling stuffed storks to infant shops.