“I do not know whether semiology will ever establish itself as a science.  The very people who observe this discipline have difficulty in defining it because everything is a sign in the world of forms, sounds, and colors, and a science embracing everything remains inconceivable.  But if we want to bide by verbal languages there are certainly considerable differences between the word as it is seen and the word as it is read and understood.  The word as it is seen is far less alphabetical than the word as it is read and pronounced.  It can be regarded as an ideogram.

Its faults are its lack of multivalence and its claim to some lasting truth.  The industry of communication would be basically undermined if the various means of expression claimed to have any duration in time.  What we need is not language but the suggestion, the arabesque, which is born and dies within a few minutes.  What we need is that which we see, hear, and touch for a single moment, and which is then consumed and replaced by a similar stimulus”

-Eugenio Montale-