
Here we have yet another sign spotted at the University of Jyväskylä. This one situated next to a door leading to people's offices. Depicted on it is a silhouette of a person talking [loudly] on a phone with a red slashed-circle NO-sign superimposed on it. It is quite clearly a self-made sign vessel, printed and taped to the wall.
One might conjecture that there have been cases of overtly loud talks disturbing the people working to warrant such a sign? (Again with singular signs implying whole dialogueshttps://languageonthemove.com/dialoguing-through-prohibitions-and-transgressions/.) The issue hasn't been severe enough to warrant an official sign and thus an authoritative intervention, but rather someone, who perhaps works nearby, has made the sign themselves. I tend to find such "personal" signs much more interesting than official top-down signs.
I also find it fascinating on how much mileage we can get from a simple square as a symbol/icon for a phone1 these ways.
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There is a sort of tangent here on how we've gone from "telephone" to just "phone". It is sort of funny in the setting of talking of people using phones too loudly, since "tele" is "far" and "phono" is "sound", so our "far-sound" has turned just to "sound". ↩