HURRAY! Language Observer has now got its own Facebook page as well as a new, shiny logo! This is obviously a cause for some cautious celebration, and spirits are high despite an overwhelming lack of cake and bubbly drinks! Oh yes indeed, so much so that it would be almost impossible to not take the opportunity and briefly reflect on the word logo itself.
Now then, the word logo in itself should be no great mystery today, referring of course to some symbol used to represent a brand, company, organization or what have you, such as the famous golden arches of McDonald’s that’s instantly recognizable to quite a lot of people. After all, who has not at one point seen those famous arches and consequently been lured into that alluring fast food realm?… IN ANY CASE, the word logo comes from the Greek word logos, meaning (among other things) “word”, “speech” and “discourse”. Strictly speaking however, the origin of the modern word is actually logogram!
Logogram might not be a word which is included in our day-to-day language repertoire, but a logogram is simply a symbol used to represent a word, such as a character in Japanese written language. Another example of a logogram is one of the different symbols which we now absolutely LOVE to include in written messages and photos on social media – because as long as a symbol is intended to represent a word (“cheers”, “money”, “stress” etc.) but does not look like what it is representing – then it is indeed a logogram by definition. It’s important to point out then that a logogram is in this sense different than a pictogram, as a pictogram is a picture which represents exactly what it looks like, such as a cat for referring to a cat or an emoticon smiley face representing, well, a smiling face 🙂 GOOD TO KNOW!
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Sources:
1) Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 2014. Logogram. In: Encyclopædia Britannica [online].
2) Harper, D., 2015. Logo. In: Online Etymology Dictionary [online].
3) Oxford University Press, 2015. Logo. In: Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary [online].
4) Wikipedia, 2015. Logogram. In: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia [online].
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