Warning Signs: The Semiotics of Danger

193 Pages·2022·2.7 MB·English

by  Marcel Danesi

Warning Signs
i
BLOOMSBURY ADVANCES IN SEMIOTICS
Semiotics has complemented linguistics by expanding its scope beyond the
phoneme and the sentence to include texts and discourse, and their
rhetorical, performative, and ideological functions. It has brought into focus
the multimodality of human communication. B loomsbury Advances in
Semiotics publishes original works in the fi eld demonstrating robust
scholarship, intellectual creativity, and clarity of exposition. These works
apply semiotic approaches to linguistics and non-verbal productions, social
institutions and discourses, embodied cognition and communication, and the
new virtual realities that have been ushered in by the Internet. It also is
inclusive of publications in relevant domains such as socio-semiotics,
evolutionary semiotics, game theory, cultural and literary studies,
human–computer interactions, and the challenging new dimensions
of human networking afforded by social websites.
Series Editor : Paul Bouissac is Professor Emeritus at the University of
Toronto (Victoria College), Canada. He is a world-renowned fi gure in
semiotics and a pioneer of circus studies. He runs the SemiotiX Bulletin
[ www.semioticon.com/semiotix] which has a global readership.

Titles in the series include:
Cognitive Semiotics, Per Aage Brandt
Computational Semiotics, Jean-Guy Meunier
Music as Multimodal Discourse, edited by Lyndon C. S. Way and Simon
McKerrell
Peirce’s Twenty-Eight Classes of Signs and the Philosophy of Representation ,
Tony Jappy
Semiotics of the Christian Imagination , Domenico Pietropaolo
The Languages of Humor, edited by Arie Sover
The Semiotics of Caesar Augustus , Elina Pyy
The Semiotics of Clowns and Clowning , Paul Bouissac
The Semiotics of Emoji , Marcel Danesi
The Semiotics of Light and Shadows , Piotr Sadowski
The Semiotics of X , Jamin Pelkey
The Social Semiotics of Tattoos , Chris William Martin
ii
Warning Signs
The Semiotics of Danger
MARCEL DANESI
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK
1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA
29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of
Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

First published in Great Britain 2022

Copyright © Marcel Danesi, 2022

Marcel Danesi has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identifi ed as Author of this work.

Cover images: Fly Agaric poisonous mushroom © Martin Vore/ Shutterstock,
Nuclear energy radioactive symbol © Fewerton/ Shutterstock,
Poison bottle © Macondo/ Shutterstock,
Signs warning of the danger of fi re, high voltage, temperature © Anton Proliovov

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior
permission in writing from the publishers.

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for,
any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in
this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher
regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have
ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: HB: 978-1-3501-7829-8
PB: 978-1-3501-7830-4
ePDF: 978-1-3501-7832-8
eBook: 978-1-3501-7831-1

Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics

T ypeset by Refi neCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk NR35 1EF

To fi nd out more about our authors and books, visit w ww.bloomsbury.com
and sign up for our n ewsletters .
iv
C ontents
List of Figures vi
Preface viii
1 Perceiving and Communicating Danger 1
2 Representing and Interpreting Danger 25
3 The Sebeok Report 47
4 Verbal Warnings 67
5 Pictorial Warnings 87
6 Narrative Warnings 113
7 Understanding Danger 133
Bibliography 157
Index 177
v
Figures
1.1 Explosion image. 2
1.2 Hazard pictogram. 9
1.3 Revised hazard pictogram. 11
1.4 GHS hazard pictogram. 12
1.5 Cave of Beasts, Gilf Kebir, Libyan Desert. 13
1.6 Vesuvius Erupting at Night , William Marlow. 14
2.1 Trefoil pictogram. 26
2.2 The Scream, Edvard Munch. 29
2.3 US Department of Energy danger symbol, 2004. 29
2.4 Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu, Edvard Munch, 1919. 30
2.5 Girls on the Pier, Edvard Munch, 1904. 32
2.6 Radiation warning pictogram. 35
3.1 WIPP’s warning text. 51
3.2 WIPP’s information center. 52
3.3 Line drawing (Hudson 1960). 56
3.4 Tombstone warning , Sheikh Abd el-Qurna, Egypt. 66
4.1 Hunger stone, D eˇ cˇ í n, Czech Republic, 74
4.2 Part of the R ö k runestone, Ö desh ö g in Ö sterg ö tland, Sweden. 75
4.3 Japanese tsunami stone, Aneyoshi. 85
5.1 Hopi prophecy rock , Oraibi, Arizona 88
5.2 Hopi prophecy etching (Waters 1963). 88
5.3 Cueva de las Manos, Santa Cruz Province, Argentina. 90
5.4 Cave painting, Lascaux, France. 92
5.5 Cueva de la Pileta, Má laga, Spain. 93
5.6 Aztec ritual for fl ooding, Diego Durá n. 94
5.7 Noah’s Ark , Gerona Beatus , 975 CE . 95
5.8 Apocalypse , Biblia Pauperum, c . 1315–17 96
5.9 Disastro naturale , Leonardo da Vinci, c . 1517. 97
5.10 Alluvione , Michelangelo Buonarroti, c . 1508. 97
5.11 Esto es lo verdadero, Francisco Goya, 1820. 99
5.12 Skull and crossbones symbol. 102
5.13 Biohazard pictogram, Dow Chemical, 1966. 104
5.14 Neolithic triskelion. 104
7.1 Hypothetical semantic differential for “climate change.” 138
vi
FIGURES vii
7.2 Indonesian cave art, Sulawesi. 146
7.3 Covid watch pictogram. 147
7.4 Coronavirus emoji. 147
7.5 Coronavirus illustration, Centers for Disease Control. 148
7.6 Danse of Death, Michael Wolgemut, 1493. 152
Preface
S igns of danger are everywhere. Some are human-made ones designed as
specifi c warnings, such as the typical labels indicating the presence of
poison in bottles or the hazard placards alerting people to the presence of
toxic waste at specifi c locales. Others are immanent in the environment,
including extreme meteorological events such as hurricanes and tsunamis,
which are natural warning signs of danger to human life. How do we understand
warnings and the dangers they represent? What do they tell us about the
sense of danger itself? How have humans perceived and dealt with danger
across time and across cultures? Are paintings on prehistoric cave walls the
fi rst recorded images of danger and fear? Are ancient fl ood myths cautionary
warning tales of human destructive activities?
These are the kinds of questions that fall directly under the analytical rubric
of semiotics—the science of signs. But, as far as can be told, this discipline
has been used only once in the past to study danger and warning sign systems
explicitly—namely by the late American semiotician, Thomas A. Sebeok, who
was commissioned by the US Department of Energy in 1981 to come up with
a set of recommendations for designing effective warning signage to be
placed at the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste depository site in Nevada that
would withstand the test of time, remaining understandable to people 10,000
years into the future, given that the radioactive waste at the site would remain
dangerous until then. Sebeok’s recommendations were published in a report
in 1984 ( Communication Measures to Bridge Ten Millennia )—a report that is
still being discussed to this day, perhaps because of some of its seemingly
quirky suggestions (as will be discussed in this book). Signifi cantly, it was
instrumental in laying the groundwork for a new branch or subfi eld of semiotics
to emerge, n uclear semiotics , bolstered by the publication of a special 1984
issue of the German periodical, Z eitschrift fü r Semiotik, dedicated to the study
of the different ways in which warning signage could be made effective and
enduring across long stretches of time in the future.
However, very little has been done in this subfi eld since then, with only a
handful of studies having come forth that utilize semiotics in the context
of the dangers that environmental crises pose to human survival (for example,
Leone 2012 and Abbati 2019). It was not, actually, the initial goal of nuclear
semiotics to extend its purview in this way. However, because Sebeok
viii
PREFACE ix
examined methods for making signs withstand meaning decay and how
danger can be communicated effectively, a broader reach of nuclear semiotics
was implicit from the outset. The objective of this book is, in fact, to extend
the reach of nuclear semiotics, applying it to the general study of danger and
warning signage, in the hope that it can provide relevant insights on current
crises, such as climate change and the rise of infectious diseases, from the
angle of how they are perceived and represented (in language, in images, in
stories, and so on). This line of inquiry may, itself, suggest ways of devising
meaningful social action to curb the destructive human activities that may
have brought them about. As far as I know, nuclear semiotics has rarely been
envisioned in this way—as a means to suggest a course of action that will
hopefully be benefi cial to enhancing human survival. While this might seem to
be an extravagant claim, the argument will be made throughout this book that
it is not.
The fear of extinction that people have always faced has been an
unconscious archetypal theme in all representational modes, from the early
cave-wall drawings and ancient fl ood myths to subsequent narratives and
poetry. All these semiotic artifacts have withstood the test of time, in line with
what Sebeok himself emphasized. The warnings placed on ancient Egyptian
tombs, alerting visitors of the dire consequences they would face if they
entered them, are as understandable today as they were when they were
created. The tales of apocalyptic scenarios portrayed in the ancient myths,
harboring warnings of impending doom and existential uncertainty, similarly
resonate with us to this day. As Alaszewski (2015: 205) has aptly put it: “All
societies have [had] to cope with uncertainty, the essential unpredictability of
the future and account for past misfortunes.” In his fi eldwork with the Trobriand
Islanders, the Polish-born British anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski (1922)
discovered the importance of rituals, stories, and sayings as part of an
unconscious folkloric code for coping with uncertainty. Much can be learned
from studying such codes from the past, since they persist in different forms
to this day (Douglas 1966). Science is also a strategy for taming uncertainty,
based on empirically-testable predictions rather than mythical ones.
Epidemiologists, for example, correlate the incidence of a pandemic disease
to its spatial, temporal, and social distribution, so as to provide a statistical
basis for anticipating or preventing future incidences of the disease.
Nevertheless, as will be discussed throughout this book, reliance on folkloric-
mythical-symbolic codes as effective warning systems has not disappeared in
an age of science, as Sebeok emphasized in his 1984 report.
The fi rst two chapters of this book present an overview of what a semiotic
study of danger might entail. Chapter 3 revisits Sebeok’s report in order to
glean from it any insights that are germane to an expanded nuclear semiotics.
It also looks at the emergence of this branch and what kinds of early ideas it