The meaning of arrows

December 29, 2008 12:17 PM

Many moons ago I read that arrow symbolism (i.e. "→") is meaningless unless your culture has a background of using bows and arrows (or spears, I guess). Does anyone know of a source for this kind of information?
posted by Dr. Send to society & culture (13 comments total)

I remember reading about it on the Pioneer Plaque wiki.
posted by cowbellemoo at 12:39 PM on December 29, 2008

Can you name a culture that does not now use nor have a history of using spears?

You don't even have to be a Homo Sapien to have this as a cultural reference (or even a Homo). Neandertals also used spears.
posted by Pollomacho at 12:39 PM on December 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I have the same issue with this. What culture has never used spears/arrows? It strikes me (pun not intended) that spears or arrows are more fundamental to humanity than the wheel or the figure zero.
posted by ob at 1:08 PM on December 29, 2008

I'm with Pollomacho. While I'll happily accept that the arrow is non-intuitive (hey, from the symbol, which way does the electricity flow in a diode?), this fact seems kind of useless. I can't find any culture that didn't have spears; and can find only a very few that didn't develop the bow--and at least one of them has blowguns instead.

And at this point, I doubt that you can find any culture that hasn't seen an arrow.
posted by Netzapper at 1:11 PM on December 29, 2008

Hell, chimps and some crows use pointy sticks. Good luck finding any human cultures who haven't.
posted by rodgerd at 1:35 PM on December 29, 2008

Sorry, no source for you, but I'll throw in some more armchair symbolic analysis. I always felt the arrow symbol was pretty obvious even without the weapon. Most people intrinsically know that aerodynamically things are pointy at the front and thick at the back. If they don't, then the symbol of the arrow can easily be interpreted as a culmination on a point. While not direction of travel it's a usefully similar concept. (But I still use the pictographic representation of 'greater than' and 'less than' signs to figure out which side is which.)

It might be useful to see if the word for the projectile and the symbol is the same in a broad number of languages. That would at least give a baseline of correlation.

Oh man, I want to go off on bullet points so much...
posted by Ookseer at 1:36 PM on December 29, 2008

The arrow looks really intuitive to me- it's the approximate shape of a bird or fish or quadrupedal mammal (small head, flaring out to wings, pectoral fins, or big muscular haunches), and those animals all tend to travel pointy end first.

But I guess the arrow shape is also opposite to the direction the river would be flowing if it made a chevron pattern around an obstacle sticking out of the stream.
posted by pseudostrabismus at 1:45 PM on December 29, 2008

I have heard - but I cannot recall where, and really have no idea if it's true or not - that in Australian Aboriginal culture, an arrow indicated the opposite direction from what most of us would expect. Supposedly, what some might call an "arrow" instead represented an emu's footprint, and hence direction of travel. (Again, I have no idea if this is true or not, but it's a counter to "the way we do it is completely intuitive and everyone has arrows/spears" argument. Where in the world doesn't have tridactyl birds? Universal!)
posted by buxtonbluecat at 1:54 PM on December 29, 2008 [1 favorite]

I tracked down a citation for the wiki I linked:
annoyed by the dismissiveness of subsequent posters (for shame!)

He explained the idea in the 1970's by citing the pictograph on the Pioneer spacecraft that was launched in 1972: in the unlikely event that beings from outer space intercepted the craft, the pictograph was supposed to tell them what human beings looked like and where Earth was in our solar system. Line drawings showed a man and a woman. The sun and its nine planets were a row of circles; an arrow from the fourth circle, Earth, pointed to a drawing of Pioneer. The pictograph was meant to be, quite literally, universal.

But, Mr. Gombrich asked, what could a directional line mean to creatures who hadn't invented bows and arrows? And if, somehow, they were to grasp that the drawings depicted humans, without a knowledge of foreshortening how could they know that the woman's body was slightly turned, partly obscuring a hand? They would assume that Earth women had a claw.

The pictograph illustrated that illusion in art derives from a system of conventions evolved over centuries of trial and error, a process of "making and matching" whereby our reaction to an image corresponds to the reality of what it represents. "Art and Illusion," in which he elaborated on this idea, was his attempt to describe "what happens when somebody sits down and tries to paint what is in front of him."

From an obit of E. H. Gombrich
posted by cowbellemoo at 1:54 PM on December 29, 2008

There's a bit of discussion here, with some sources mentioned (e.g. Piet Westendorp's "Gebruiksaanwijzingen") that I don't have time to track down right now, but it seems possible that usage of the arrow symbol as an indicator of direction isn't especially old - circa 18th century, by which time the bow and arrow was on its way out. A representation of a pointing finger is probably much older.
posted by buxtonbluecat at 2:16 PM on December 29, 2008

My professor in Visual Media in Technical Communication brought up the arrow. We were discussing use of icons and their implicit meanings -- I recall him saying that the arrow can interpreted as a bird's foot print and imply the opposite direction.

On preivew, what buxtonbluecat said.
posted by rdhatt at 2:51 PM on December 29, 2008

Thanks everyone. The emu footprint theory cited by buxtonbluecat (and in the discussion) sounds familiar in retrospect.
posted by Dr. Send at 3:17 PM on December 29, 2008

"hey, from the symbol, which way does the electricity flow in a diode?"

That's the way it was thought to flow, when they came up with the symbols.
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 4:46 PM on December 29, 2008