If you use first names everywhere at work, how do you signify to a colleague that you want to be a real friend?
The Genderbread Person, shaped like a gingerbread man, has a cartoon heart denoting "sexual orientation"; a cartoon brain, for "gender identity"; a crotch area that represents "biological sex"; and a dotted line, surrounding the figure, that signifies "gender expression" — how you present yourself to the world, in behavior and dress.
In "Sodom and Gomorrah," Proust himself makes quite a bit of fun of the issue of pronunciations, and how they signify class and tact, and specifically, the matter of an "S," of guessing if it's silent or sibilant.
The irony is, in drawing attention to semiotics and our power to alter what, and how, things signify, Barthes didn't necessarily educate the masses as to their own consumerist susceptibility, but in fact alerted new generations of marketing and advertising executives to their power to influence the channels of signification.
Reflecting on that sculpture, Artlink Magazine's reviewer, Daniel Thomas, remarked on how the work signified "how colonisers always get things wrong; how Europeans looking for China, and its fine porcelain manufactures, stumbled instead upon the land of the kangaroo, and traded and planted ideas of racial and cultural superiority".
"Julianne knows how to stop signifying, how to let the viewer fill in," Haynes said.
After rewatching the credits (probably for the 15th time), I noticed how predominately they signify religious iconography, and let's not forget that Tuttle is a reverend.
The number of them you wore signified how many people you had hooked up with.
The documentary talked of how the Wall "signified hard work," how "an idea became an obsession," how some sections that were built by the Chinese Army took so long they eventually brought their families to combat homesickness.
