A Logo for Linguistics
A Letter from Logographical Editor E’Kad K’Kamhir
The vending arena—some might call them commercial zones or even, if you can bear the jarring ugliness of the phrase, “shopping centres”—of this blue-green world of ours has much to tell us about the comings-and-goings of women and men in their mundane quotidianity. But little strikes the eye more saliently as one ambles, or, if you prefer, locomotes, throughout, through and along these bustling avenues of trade, than the plethora of what have come to be called logos (not to be confused either semantically or phonetically with that over-familiar second declension Greek noun)—salient images which burn themselves into the shopper’s cerebrum, shaping his thinking and his consumer behaviour.
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Helene Balslev Clausen, Carmen Cortés Zaborras, Ase Johnsen (eds.), 2015, El discurso de instituciones, empresas y viajeros: Del texto al turismo y del turismo al texto, Peter Lang.
Chiasmus of the Month
March 2020
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This is a linguistics journal—and therefore no place to moralise. It would be amiss of me to take a stand on the ethics of this blatant, capitalist propaganda which has turned the once quaint and lovable high street into a morass of flashing neon semiotics.
The salient point is this: what might be the logo for linguistics—and why have we as a community of language-ologists not yet found time in our admittedly busy schedules to seek out some possible logos, thrash out which ones are worthy of our great discipline and max out our collective credit cards on producing and distributing the chosen emblem? Linguistics isn’t some two-bit plastic bag of fast-food carry-out, nor is it a three-piece sitting-room suite in dolphin grey. But if these mere material products and others like them which are bought in haste today and wither and crumble by a week on Thursday are apparently worthy of logos, why not the arts, sciences and ruminatoriations of the languagists?
So, don’t log off—logo yourselves up! Let’s logo-ise linguistics! Suggestions please, by return of post!
