From: Peter Eyland (epe@newt.phys.unsw.edu.au) Date: Mon Oct 21
1996 - 22:04:30 EDT  Thanks Wes for your input. You write with
substance and imagination.  A word often has a cluster of
various meanings associated with it and these change with
textual and temporal context. My interest in the word *image* is
that our present technological context has put unintended
meaning into past context.  Consider the history of the
icon/image complex. The great debate that split the Latin and
Greek speaking churches (with apologies to Animal Farm and
anyone who takes unintended offense) was *two legs good, three
legs bad*. Thus *icon* drifted from statue to fairly flat in
Gk/Rus tradition. Then the Xerox Co in the 1950s invented the
WIMP approach to computing (Windows/ICON/Mouse/Pull-down menus),
pushing *icon* into symbol.  In the renaissance, optical images
were shown to be illusions. They are not reality, mere
reflections (and refractions) of reality. There are stories that
certain New Guinea tribes could not interpret