The phrase "a mere sign" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used to indicate that something is just a simple or insignificant indication of a larger issue or concept.
Example: "The broken window was a mere sign of the neglect that had taken over the entire building."
Alternatives: "just a symbol" or "only an indication".
"If the lines of a drawing don't convey this harassment the drawing remains a mere sign".
But Dick Cheney dismissed conservation as a mere "sign of personal virtue," and administration officials waved aside pleas for a price ceiling.
Remember that Mr. Cheney sneeringly dismissed conservation as a mere "sign of personal virtue," and was scathing about people who thought price controls would help.
Along the way, Mr. Cheney sneeringly dismissed energy conservation as a mere "sign of personal virtue" and scorned California officials who called for price controls and said the crisis was being exacerbated by market manipulation.
This was the same administration, after all, that wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling and that, in the person of Vice President Dick Cheney, had dismissed the idea that conservation could help reduce the nation's energy needs, contemptuously dismissing it as a mere "sign of personal virtue".
It is now the mental or interior word (verbum interius), i.e., the mental concept, that is considered as word in its most proper sense, whereas the spoken word appears as a mere sign or voice of the word (signum verbi, vox verbi) (Augustine, De Trinitate XV 11 20, 1968, 486f)..[11] Thoughts (cogitationes) are performed in mental words.
As we shall see in §3.5, the later Wittgenstein returns to the importance of extra-mathematical application and uses it to distinguish a mere "sign-game" from a genuine, mathematical language-game.
Nevertheless, the early signs thus far are encouraging with a mere few weeks to go.
Our results support previous findings that OI is a wider, more complex syndrome than the mere sign of having an impaired orthostatic hemodynamic response [ 19].
(Mikyö Dorje 2006: 273) Therefore conventional truth is "one that is devoid of an intrinsic reality, rather it is mere name (ming tsam), mere sign (rda tsam), mere linguistic convention (tha snyad tsam), mere conception (rnam par rtog pa tsam) and mere fabrication (sgro btags pa tsam)—one that merely arises or ceases due to the force of the expressions or the conceptual linguistic convention".
In the United States in the early 1970s, citizens having attained the age of 18 were granted the right to vote; but the ceremony commemorating this right has been a secularized de-emphasis of this important rite of passage: the mere signing of one's name on a registration certificate.
