USB Symbol
Be honest, how many times have you tried to plug in a USB, only to flip it over and over, struggling to figure out which way it plugs in?
But what’s even more humbling is seeing that weird little trident symbol on the port and having no idea what it’s meant to be! The circle, square, and triangle, what do they mean?
The three-pronged USB symbol was modeled after the trident wielded by Poseidon, the ancient Greek God of the Sea.
The three shapes at the trident’s points are there to signify the variation in peripherals that can all be connected via a Universal Serial Bus or USB.
As such, the trident was designed to symbolize the technological power USBs have; being able to connect a wide range of other devices.
V Sign✌️
If you hold up your index and middle fingers, it can mean a number of different things. It can be a sign of peace, a symbol of victory, or a very rude gesture in the UK, depending on which way round the fingers are held!
But the inception of the two-fingered salute is believed to be older and more gruesome than most Brits realize.
At least one meaning of the gesture traces its origins back to the Hundred Years War, which was fought over 116 years, pretty apt name there, between France and England.
The legend states that during that conflict, the French would remove the middle and index fingers of English longbowmen they captured before returning them, as a man without those fingers was useless as an archer.
It’s said that during that time, boastful English longbowmen who weren’t captured would raise their two fingers defiantly, essentially saying "Look, I can still fight"! While pretty badass, that may just be a legend.
English longbows were famously larger and harder to wield than other bows. Most soldiers needed to use three fingers in order to pull back on the string, meaning it would make more sense for the gesture to include the ring finger as well as the middle and index, making it closer to a boy scout’s salute!
Of course, you could also argue that if the bows needed three fingers to wield, chopping off two was as good as chopping off three.
Whether true or not, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill played a large role in re-popularizing the gesture towards the start of the Second World War back in 1941.
Around that time, he was first photographed flashing the V shape with his fingers, which soon became the allied sign for victory, as V was the first letter in ‘Victory’ not only in English but also in French and Flemish, the main languages of Britain’s Non-English speaking allies.
Toyota Logo
Car manufacturer Toyota’s symbol is simple, easy to recognize, and honestly, a little confusing. Cars have four wheels, and yet their logo is three circles?
Or is it meant to depict a cowboy? Well, the logo was chosen way back in 1936 and wasn’t designed in-house.
Instead, it was the winner of a logo design competition, and it beat out 46,000 other entries. While the circles may seem random, individual elements from the design can be separated from the others in order to spell out the word Toyota.
Heart Shape ❤
Have you ever wondered why that weird, bumpy, upside-down triangle is called a heart shape? If your actual heart was shaped like that there’d be something seriously wrong with you.
A more romantic internet theory found all over Pinterest boards and boomer Facebook posts is that it represents two hearts side by side.
It’s also completely unfounded and requires a lot of artistic license to claim that it looks like that. So, if it doesn’t look like a real heart, or even two hearts, where does the heart symbol come from?
The origin of the shape dates back several hundred years BCE. Back then, there was a popular little plant called silphium. That fennel had heart-shaped bulbs and was found along the North African coast, likely near the city of Cyrene and the ancient Greeks loved it. They were so crazy about that plant they even put it on some of their coins.
Why was that little plant so popular? It had a number of uses, but its most important role was as a form of contraception. Back then if you wanted to avoid having kids, your options were limited, namely to taking silphium. And so, the plant became so popular, that it actually went extinct sometime around the second century BCE.
Silphium’s connotations with sweet lovemaking are perhaps why its distinct shape became synonymous with love and, for poetic license, the heart.
That theory has its flaws though; for starters, the heart shape as we understand it only began popping up in art from the 1250s onwards, over a thousand years after the extinction of silphium.
That gap is pretty hard to explain. Other theories posit the shape is meant to resemble a well-endowed chest, a butt, or even male privates if viewed upside down.
Radiation Symbol ☢️
If you saw the radiation symbol in the wild, you might think it was alerting you to a cool fidget spinner factory nearby! In reality, that symbol warns the viewer of nearby dangerous radioactivity.
It was first sketched by members of a Berkley research group headed by Nels Garden in 1946.
The symbol was initially magenta on a blue background, as Nels believed the colors were seen less frequently and thus, would stand out more.
The colors were later switched to magenta on yellow, before eventually standardizing as black on yellow as it makes the shapes more clearly discernible from a greater distance.
As for the symbol itself, Nels explained that it is meant to represent radioactivity escaping from an atom.
Biohazard Symbol ☣
Understood universally as the sign for biohazardous materials, the symbol looks like a gothic ink blot test. The symbol itself is simple enough; a circle trisected by three black, interlocking, tendril-like circles that peter out towards the rim.
The symbol was created by Dow Chemical engineers in 1966 and had to adhere to a set of guidelines ensuring the symbol was nondescript and recognizable.
The design they came up with broadly suggests the idea of a physical organism being disrupted by a harmful agent. Essentially, it represents a single element torn apart by a malicious substance.
Hyundai Logo
The Hyundai logo works because it’s so simple.
You might think that it's an italicized H inside a circle and nothing more. However, according to the company itself, the logo is meant to resemble two men shaking hands, as viewed from the side.
Hyundai states the logo is meant to represent prosperity and the healthy relationship Hyundai has with their customers.
Bluetooth Symbol
Bluetooth; is the technology that uses radio frequencies to allow devices to share information wirelessly over short distances. It’s truly a game-changer!
Without it, we’d still be stuck in the dark age of wired headphones, where just putting them in your pocket for a moment would tangle them in a knot so tight it’d make a sailor cry.
Looking at the symbol for it though, you may think it’s simply a stylized letter B, but there’s actually a lot of meaning hiding in those hard lines.
The design draws influence from Nordic runes; the symbols that made up the written language of the Vikings. As the symbols were usually carved into stone or wood, they were entirely comprised of straight lines rather than curves.
Imagine trying to carve a perfect circle into a tree and you’ll get it.
The Bluetooth symbol is what’s called a bind rune, which is two runes combined into one. The two runes making up the Bluetooth bind rune are the Viking equivalents for the letters H and B.
Those letters pay homage to a legendary Norse king by the name of Harald Bluetooth! Harald’s greatest accomplishment was in uniting various disparate Norse peoples under one banner, kind of like how modern Bluetooth is designed to connect various pieces of tech.
