The Effective Meaning of Signs
Message versus results.
Growing up, my friends and I enjoyed exploring a patch of woods adjacent to our neighborhood. A row of signs reading “NO TRESPASSING” stood before the treeline. I suspect the land was owned by a utility company. As an adult, I assume the signs were there to absolve the utility of legal liability if any people, including vagrants, were injured on their property. In all our days playing in those woods, no one ever stopped us or told us to get out. No one cared we were there. The sign literally read “NO TRESPASSING,” but the effective meaning of the sign was “ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK,” which we joyfully did.
A restaurant I like places “RESERVED” signs on all its patio tables. A common understanding of that sign is that the table is reserved for a specific party. Yet, when my wife and I show up for lunch without reservations, the hostess seats us at one of those “RESERVED” tables. I realize now those seats are not so much reserved as they are “in reserve.” The empty tables inside the restaurant don’t have “RESERVED” signs because patrons rarely try to seat themselves there, whereas many feel free to take a table on the street-facing patio. The signs literally read “RESERVED,” but their effective meaning is “PLEASE SEE HOSTESS FOR SEATING,” and they work surprisingly well.
In the prestige television drama Mad Men, the lecherous Don Draper asks his colleague Dr. Faye Miller about her husband’s profession. Despite wearing a wedding ring, Dr. Miller confesses she is not married. “This is just a stop sign,” she says. “I walk into a lot of offices, and it’s helped me avoid a lot of distracting conversations.” As a professional woman in the chauvinistic 1960s, Dr. Miller learned that if men think she’s married, they are less likely to pursue her romantically. The symbolic meaning of a wedding ring is that the person wearing it is married, but Dr. Miller’s intended message is “stop hitting on me and let me do my business.” Don Draper, of course, ignores her figurative “stop sign,” and the two have a doomed love affair.
Dr. Miller’s figurative “stop sign” worked about as well as the literal stop signs in my neighborhood, which have the effect of slowing down motorists who seldom come to a complete stop unless another car is speeding towards the intersection. In his book Bowling Alone, Robert D. Putnam cites a long-term 1979 study of several intersections in New York suburbs, which determined that “37 percent of all motorists made a full stop, 34 percent a rolling stop, and 29 percent no stop at all.” People often treat stop signs as if they are yield signs. I remember seeing a lot more yield signs as a kid in the ‘70s and ‘80s. Perhaps that’s because the authorities came to understand that, to get their intended results, they needed to put a stop sign where they wanted people to yield and a traffic light where they wanted people to stop.
My family and I once rented a mountain cabin in Tennessee. We drove all day to get there, and we arrived shortly after sunset during an eerie gray winter twilight. To ascend the mountain, we drove up a long, winding gravel road. At last, we came to an open gate next to a big sign that read, “BE PREPARED TO STATE YOUR BUSINESS.” What the sign implied but didn’t explicitly state was the phrase “OR ELSE.” I couldn’t help but think a shotgun might somehow be involved. We felt relieved we had our rental agreement handy. No one ever asked us to state our business, but I knew I had just encountered one of the most effective “NO TRESPASSING” signs ever.
We would like to think that most of our communication is designed to express the truth, but frequently, the words we choose, the symbols we wear, and the signs we post are meant to achieve a desired result.
Few people would call Dr. Miller a liar for wearing a wedding ring to ward off unwanted advances, but she wasn’t being honest. It illustrates how much of the information we encounter in the world is designed to manipulate behavior, sometimes for good, but sometimes for nefarious purposes. As savvy consumers of information in the modern world, we shouldn’t focus solely on what a message means; we should also seek to understand the effect it aims to produce. Only then can we decide if we want to be a party to the message’s intended result.