The navigation is our property RENE: Tell me what we have. Of value. GAEL: Whatever we've bought in cargo so far. I don't know what you want me— RENE: Anyone can buy goods. What do we really have? What do we sell? GAEL (realizing): The route. RENE: Yes. The navigation is our property. To copy a man's route is to steal it. Shane Carruth, The Modern Ocean Into the system of flight navigationownership
The arbitrariness of the sign A key difference between verbal language and the modernist ideal of a visual “language” is the arbitrariness of a verbal sign, which has no natural, inherent relationship to the concept it represents. The sound of the word “horse”, for example, does not innately resemble the concept of a horse. Ferdinand de Saussure called this arbitrariness the fundamental feature of the verbal sign. The meaning of a sign is generated by its relationship to other signs in the language: the sign’s legibility lies in its difference from other signs. Ellen Lupton & J. Abbott Miller, The ABC's of ▲■●: The Bauhaus and Design Theory Gods of the Word soundmeaninglanguage