How many words in a look?
In a newspaper industry journal (Printers' Ink, 1921), Fred R.
Barnard launched what would become over time a powerful slogan:
"One look is worth a thousand words." To make his remark sound
more convincing, he later reformulated it as "One picture is
worth a thousand words," and called it a proverb from China. Few
slogans were repeated and paraphrased more than this one.
Barnard wanted to draw people's attention to the power of
images. It took some years until the new underlying structure of
our continuous practical self-constitution confirmed an
observation made slightly ahead of its time. It should be added
that, through the millennia, craftsmen and the forerunners of
engineering used images to design artifacts and tools, and to
plan and build cities, monuments, and bridges. They realized
through their own experience how powerful images could be,
although they did not compare them to words.
Images are more concrete than words. The concreteness of the
visual makes images inappropriate for describing other images.
However, it does not prevent human beings from associating
images with the most abstract concepts they develop in the
course of their practical or theoretical experience. Words start
by being relatively close to what they denote, and end up so far
removed from the objects or actions they name that, unless they
are generated together with an object or action (like the word
calculator, from calculae, stones for counting), they seem
arbitrary.
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