[HN Gopher] The No Symbol: The History of the Red Circle-Slash
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The No Symbol: The History of the Red Circle-Slash
Author : cratermoon
Score : 109 points
Date : 2024-03-09 16:14 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (tedium.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (tedium.co)
| Cyberdog wrote:
| I was very surprised to learn just how new this symbol is. I'm a
| bit too young for it but apparently there were times in my
| parents' lifetimes when few Americans would have understood it.
| Animats wrote:
| It's not new. It's been an European standard traffic sign since
| the 1930s.
| jstanley wrote:
| That's pretty new!
| webwielder2 wrote:
| Pretty much everything except farming and church is new.
| ginko wrote:
| Farming has been around for over five times longer than
| the church.
| d0gsg0w00f wrote:
| Uhh...I don't have sources but I'd imagine humans prayed
| to _something_ before they went mammoth hunting or
| picking berries long before farming.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Organized religion, writing, and agriculture were a self-
| supporting set. The people today that didn't develop that
| set don't pray.
| robocat wrote:
| Agriculture == 4chan/internet
|
| Religon == memes
|
| Writing == telling memes to others
| tialaramex wrote:
| The Church requires that you've decided this needs to be
| organized, all you need to start praying before you go
| hunt for food is superstition.
|
| The Princes Alice experiments show why superstition might
| be valuable (and so get preserved in a culture) if you
| don't have much technology to provide oversight. Children
| were told to perform a task and that an (invisible)
| Princess, Alice is watching to check they don't cheat
| while the adults are away. Superstitious children didn't
| cheat because they believed in Alice watching them. The
| non-superstitious children cheated, _after_ first
| verifying that in fact Alice does not seem to exist (e.g.
| passing their hand through space supposedly occupied by
| the invisible princess)
| samatman wrote:
| "The church" is a metonym for Christianity.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| The symbol has existed for some good 2/3 of the time
| international standards existed as a concept.
|
| As the articles says on the end, we don't know how old non-
| standardized versions of it are.
| themadturk wrote:
| If you think about it, though, the symbol has been around
| longer than most people today have been alive, and for a
| substantial amount of the time people have been driving.
| Compared to other symbols, it may be fairly "new" (for
| example, the Christian cross or Islamic crescent), but in
| the realm of widely standardized symbols, it's pretty old.
| SamBam wrote:
| That doesn't necessarily contradict what GP said...
| fsckboy wrote:
| > _an European standard traffic sign since the 1930s_
|
| and how's the standardization drive going? https://en.wikiped
| ia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_traffic_sign#No_mo... (link somebody
| else posted)
| webwielder2 wrote:
| I struggle to find this emoji on Slack on a regular basis.
| Antrikshy wrote:
| Just type "no" in search and it should be one of the top
| options.
| pimlottc wrote:
| Wikipedia calls it the "No Symbol" [0]. ISO 7010 calls it the
| "prohibition sign" [1]. In Unicode, it's available as a combining
| character with the practical name "COMBINING ENCLOSING CIRCLE
| BACKSLASH" (U+20E0) [2] and in emoji form it's the "NO ENTRY
| SIGN" (U+1F6AB) [3].
|
| 0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_symbol
|
| 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_7010
|
| 2: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+20E0
|
| 3: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1F6AB
| mistersquid wrote:
| > Wikipedia calls it the "No Symbol" [0]. ISO 7010 calls it the
| "prohibition sign" [1].
|
| "Circle-bar" to my mind is the most eloquent and evocative of
| the names I've seen for this symbol.
|
| I can't remember where I heard/read "circle-bar" which was many
| many years ago.
| pimlottc wrote:
| "Slashed circle" is the most succinct description I can come
| up with. To me, "bar" suggests a horizontal line, like a
| capital-Theta Th
| fsckboy wrote:
| yes, the "do not enter" sign is a circle and bar
| HPsquared wrote:
| No entry should be a red circle background with horizontal
| white bar across the centre.
| layer8 wrote:
| That's U+26D4: https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+26D4
|
| U+1F6AB is for roundtrip compatibility with the Japanese KDDI
| emoji set (#31 here: http://emoji.digital/kddi-au/).
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| Those date from 1993 and 2010. There's also U+26D4 NO ENTRY
| (2009) and U+1F6C7 PROHIBITED SIGN (2014). I wonder what the
| history is that we ended up with four different code points for
| a similar concept.
| pimlottc wrote:
| I included just the ones that were the same visual
| representation, U+26D4 is a different symbol. The glyph for
| U+1F6C7 seems to be missing in most places, I can't find an
| authoritative representation of it to confirm it's the same
| visual symbol.
|
| EDIT: Looks like U+1F6C7 "PROHIBITED SIGN" is indeed the same
| symbol, as seen in the Unicode 7.0 charts [0]
|
| 0:
| https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/Unicode-7.0/U70-1F680.pdf
| JadeNB wrote:
| > I included just the ones that were the same visual
| representation, U+26D4 is a different symbol. The glyph for
| U+1F6C7 seems to be missing in most places, I can't find an
| authoritative representation of it to confirm it's the same
| visual symbol.
|
| I don't think that there's any meaningful sense in which
| two Unicode code points may be said to have, or not have,
| the same symbol, except in reference to a particular font.
| The standard just indicates some possibilities:
|
| > The shapes of the reference glyphs used in these code
| charts are not prescriptive. Considerable variation is to
| be expected in actual fonts. The particular fonts used in
| these charts were provided to the Unicode Consortium by a
| number of different font designers, who own the rights to
| the fonts.
| philwelch wrote:
| And yet we still needed to do Han unification. Unicode is
| ridiculous at this point.
| dwheeler wrote:
| The article traces the symbol to March 1931's League of Nations
| "Convention Concerning the Unification of Road Signs" in Geneva,
| Switzerland.
|
| But someone must have suggested it so it could be added to the
| convention. Who was that?
| lmm wrote:
| According to
| https://history.stackexchange.com/questions/74386/what-is-th...
| it was developed by a subcommittee of the convention,
| apparently from scratch (or at least, from signs that didn't
| have a slash).
| bloopernova wrote:
| A similarly recent symbol, from the late 1950s, is the peace
| sign. Designed by Gerald Holtom:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Holtom (wiki page for Mr
| Holtom includes a discussion of the peace symbol story)
| ehecatl42 wrote:
| Re. ubiquity making things hard to find-- Recent application
| naming is infuriating! Consider, in GNOME, for example, Nautilus
| vs Files. "GNOME Files" does not, of course, help. Same with
| "Apple Photos".
|
| GRRR!
|
| About as helpful as trying to debug "An error has occurred".
| formerly_proven wrote:
| Trying to hide the real name of the application is some weird
| gnome pastime.
| Hnrobert42 wrote:
| Apple Photos, Music, Numbers, Notes... It's truly exasperating
| trying to surface an answer for a question like "how do I sort
| photos in Apple Photos by date of photo not date added?"
|
| At least Google figured out after the fact that golang made
| more sense than go.
| btbuildem wrote:
| TL;DR:
|
| > March 1931, when the League of Nations, attempting to manage
| the sudden explosion in road traffic, convened a Convention
| Concerning the Unification of Road Signs in Geneva
|
| It comes from traffic signs in the first half of the 20th
| century.
| m-i-l wrote:
| Was hoping the article might shed some light on the ambiguity of
| some of the prohibition signs in the UK and parts of Europe, e.g.
| the "no motor vehicles" sign[0]. Given that the ones with the red
| circle but without the red slash typically mean up to what is
| shown is allowed and anything above is not (e.g. maximum speed,
| maximum width, maximum height), the one showing a car and a
| motorbike could reasonably be interpreted as anything up to the
| size of a motorbike and car are allowed but anything bigger (such
| as a lorry and a bus) are not. Adding a simple slash, as the rest
| of the world seems to do, and as per other prohibition signs in
| the UK and Europe (e.g. no right turn) would remove all
| ambiguity. Wonder if there's some strange history behind that
| apparent anomaly.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prohibitory_traffic_sign#No_mo...
| Dibby053 wrote:
| I always thought the slashed ones were ambiguous, as adding a
| slash on top of a red circle which already signifies
| prohibition could be interpreted as a double negation.
| urbandw311er wrote:
| Sorry to be that guy, but I was less fascinated and more bemused
| by this one. Surely the origins of this would simply be somebody
| formalising the representation of "crossing something out"? An
| act as old as cave paintings, one assumes.
| SamBam wrote:
| Why assume instead of reading the article?
|
| Can you find examples older than 100 years old that show a
| thing crossed out to mean "don't do this thing?" And how close
| are they to this representation? That's what the author was
| trying to find out.
| scottmcdot wrote:
| Being Australian, I accidentally rode my bicycle down the entry
| lane to a German autobahn after seeing a sign with a bike and a
| circle around it (not through it).
| sbrother wrote:
| I did the same thing in the Netherlands. And promptly studied
| the local road signs after that terrifying experience.
| NelsonMinar wrote:
| AKA "bend dexter", in the sense of heraldry.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bend_(heraldry)
|
| (Credit for this observation goes to Ryvar in the Metafilter
| discussion of this article.)
| wyldfire wrote:
| Interesting!
|
| I'd heard it referred to as a "bar sinister" before but when I
| looked it up I couldn't find anything to confirm that. I hadn't
| thought of looking it up in the context of heraldry.
|
| I suppose dexter when it's left-to-right and sinister when it's
| right-to-left?
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