If you lived here, you'd be home by now - rendered in White-o-Glyphics

If you lived here you'd be home by now. At least, if you could read the White-o-Glyphics, which, as you look more closely, seems like you, as a matter of fact, can read White-o-Glyphics.

"MY IDEA," says author and originator Matthew White:

"If we took all the common graphic symbols floating around nowadays, would we have enough to make a viable hieroglyphic language? Would it be possible to translate Finnegan's Wake or Moby Dick entirely into dingbats, whim-whams and clip art?

"We'll go at it in two steps. First, let's harvest all the signs, symbols, icons, etc. in common use. For example, as I write this, I see dozens of standardized symbols at the top of this screen indicating copy, cut, paste, save, undo, print, etc. On the way to work this morning, I noticed 10 distinct graphic symbols on the elevator control panel -- up, down, open, close, stop, phone, alarm, fireman, handicapped and exit. In fact, now that I've spent a few months poking around and noticing these things, I've compiled a vocabulary of some 500 pre-existing symbols that some -- maybe most -- of you will recognize immediately.

"Second step, we fill the gaps. Rather than trying to draw a specific picture for every object and concept in human experience, let's instead use various combinations of our five hundred or so root glyphs to create compound words."

And a fine idea at that. So fine, that one might fail to notice that, elsewhere on this very site, exist an amazing compilation called the "Historical Atlas of the 20th Century. And, by golly, if that isn't just what it turns out to be. Complex. Detailed. Animated. In depth.

This guy, Matthew White, is doing some serious playing around here.

from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith