When a designer is working on a page layout, they will sometimes put in ‘placeholder text’. It’s a feature in most modern desktop publishing programs. It begins with something along the lines of Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet and continues for a whole paragraph of 70-odd words. There’s a good explanation of the origins of the text here.

Of course, designers use it to see how a layout will look once words are added.

I’m going off on a bit of a tangent though because I wanted to talk about the dishwasher where I work.

There are a lot of people in this office and the kitchen is shared space. There’s also a system worked out for doing the dishes which has evolved over time. Anyone can put dishes in the dishwasher. When it’s full, someone on kitchen duty will put in the little dishwasher tab and turn it on. In order to let people know what part of the dirty/clean cycle the dishwasher is at, someone made a sign saying, on one side ‘dishes washing or ready to be put away’ and on the other, ‘dishes ready to be loaded’.

Now the pedant in me looks at the ‘dishes ready to be loaded’ side and thinks ‘Well, that should say “ready to be loaded with dishes”, or just “ready to be loaded” because saying what it says looks at it from the dishes’ point of view, not from the dishwasher’s’. We don’t know if dishes are ready to be loaded. If they’ve just been put away, none of them will be ready, at least not till anyone’s used them. If I had been making the sign, I would have made the sign say ‘load me’ and ‘empty me (if I’m finished)’.

But the point I’m trying to get at in a very roundabout kind of way, is that in this situation, it doesn’t really matter what is written on the sign, as long as people can glean some idea that one side indicates the dishes might be washed and should be put away, and on the other, that users may put dishes in. It could have just been a double-sided dot: red on one side, green on the other. Sometimes, the words are superfluous.

One of my favourite bits of graffiti is of two stencilled words that read: ARBITRARY SIGN.

The sign is saying “This is a piece of graffiti”. In this case, the medium is the message