From the stop sign to the laugh-cry emoji, symbols play a critical and ubiquitous role in everyday life. A forthcoming exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, “Give Me a Sign: The ...

The hunt to decode one of the world’s strangest writing systems has shifted from a fringe obsession to a serious scientific ...

Scholars have recently question whether ancient Indus inscriptions code for language. American and Indian scientists used statistics to show that the 4,500-year-old Indus symbols' pattern follows that ...

Politics are a symbolically charged activity. Political symbols are powerful and significant. That doesn't mean, of course, that politics are not substantial. Political decisions affect our lives, our ...

As the semanticist S.I. Hayakawa stressed in his classic book Language in Thought and Action, words are not the things they represent. Words are symbols. It’s the manipulation of those symbols that ...

Voters standing in line at Precinct 36 as they wait to vote in the general election in Jackson, Miss. AP BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — Alabama voters reversed themselves from a few years ago and removed racist ...

Alabama voters reversed themselves from a few years ago and removed racist vestiges of segregation from the state constitution that courts long ago ruled unconstitutional. Rhode Island did a similar a ...

A Coast Guard personnel directive updated language identifying symbols of racial or religious hatred, setting off a political firestorm this week.