Today's Hieroglyphics

In his piece 'Show and Tell,' Scott McCloud discusses how words and pictures have separated over time. However, some languages still use pictures and words simultaneously, such as Chinese and Japanese. Although the pictures do not exactly resemble their real-life meanings, they come close. For example, the Japanese character for eye is 目. The top and bottom sections are the white of the eye, while the middle is the pupil, making the character look like an actual eye. More complex characters can be broken down to convey several different meanings, such as the character for fish, 魚. If you break it down into three parts, top, bottom, and middle, you get three separate meanings. The top section means to 'hook,' the middle 'rice field,' and the bottom 'fire.' While spilt apart, each section has no meaning, but together they form 'fish.' Another example is 好. This can be divided into left and right sides. The left means 'woman' while the right means 'child.' Together, they make 'like.' In this way, words and pictures do still cooperate, even though the symbol is not always identical to the real life counterpart. The hieroglyphics McCloud holds a "vague longing" for do succeed in terms of resemblance to their meaning - even so , the closest thing to hieroglyphics in today's society is Japanese, or Chinese. Perhaps through learning one of these languages, McCloud can ease his longing.