peaceandlove
03-21-2009, 04:07 AM
A PICTURE is WORTH a TRILLION Words ~ Scenes from The Recession 3/18/2009
(Thought I'd better inflate the infamous saying in keeping with the trend. :naughty:)
March 18, 2009
The state of our global economy: foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, layoffs, abandoned projects, and the people and industries caught in the middle. It can be difficult to capture financial pressures in photographs, but here a few recent glimpses into some of the places and lives affected by what some are calling the "Great Recession". (edit: After reading some comments about this on Boing Boing, I was able to track down the location of the newspaper boxes in photo #30. The boxes belong to the San Francisco Chronicle, who I called and confirmed that the boxes had been removed per city rules, not due to recession. The photo came across the wire with the caption below, the contextual error was mine.) (35 photos total) Great photos, well worth saving for posterity, eek! :zip:
Photos from around the world: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/scenes_from_the_recession.html
Looks like you will have to copy and paste link; for the second time today, the links I paste are not coming up as click on links, whatever.
ORIGIN OF "A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS:exclamation:"(or Ten Thousand, you decide)
Meaning
A picture tells a story as well as a large amount of descriptive text.
Origin
This phrase emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century. Its introduction is widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title "One look is worth a thousand words", in Printer's Ink, December 1921. Barnard claimed the phrase's source to be oriental by adding the text "so said a famous Japanese philosopher, and he was right".
Printer's Ink printed another form of the phrase in March 1927, this time suggesting a Chinese origin:
http://i42.tinypic.com/t7n52a.jpg
"Chinese proverb. One picture is worth ten thousand words."
The arbitrary escalation from 'one thousand' to 'ten thousand' and the switching from Japan to China as the source leads us to smell a rat with this derivation. In fact, Barnard didn't introduce the phrase - his only contribution was the incorrect suggestion that the country of origin was Japan or China. This has led to another popular belief about the phrase, i.e. that it was coined by Confucius. It might fit the Chinese-sounding 'Confucius he say' style, but the Chinese derivation was pure invention.
Many things had been thought to be 'worth ten thousand words' well before pictures got in on the act. For example:
"One timely deed is worth ten thousand words" - The Works of Mr. James Thomson, 1802.
"That tear, good girl, is worth, ten thousand words" - The Trust: A Comedy, in Five Acts, 1808.
"One fact well understood by observation, and well guided development, is worth a thousand times more than a thousand words" - The American Journal of Education, 1858.
The idea that a picture can convey what might take many words to express was voiced by a character in Ivan S. Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, 1862:
"The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book."
A similar idea was seen very widely in the USA from the early 20th century, in adverts for Doan's Backache Kidney Pills, which included a picture of a man holding his back and the text "Every picture tells a story".
http://i41.tinypic.com/2hmotgk.jpg
Neither of the above led directly to 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. Who it was who married the 'worth ten thousand words' with 'picture' isn't known, but we do know that the phrase is American in origin. It began to be used quite frequently in the US press from around the 1920s onward. The earliest example that I can find is from the text of an instructional talk given by the newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club, in March 1911:
"Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words."
Source: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words.html
(Thought I'd better inflate the infamous saying in keeping with the trend. :naughty:)
March 18, 2009
The state of our global economy: foreclosures, evictions, bankruptcies, layoffs, abandoned projects, and the people and industries caught in the middle. It can be difficult to capture financial pressures in photographs, but here a few recent glimpses into some of the places and lives affected by what some are calling the "Great Recession". (edit: After reading some comments about this on Boing Boing, I was able to track down the location of the newspaper boxes in photo #30. The boxes belong to the San Francisco Chronicle, who I called and confirmed that the boxes had been removed per city rules, not due to recession. The photo came across the wire with the caption below, the contextual error was mine.) (35 photos total) Great photos, well worth saving for posterity, eek! :zip:
Photos from around the world: http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/03/scenes_from_the_recession.html
Looks like you will have to copy and paste link; for the second time today, the links I paste are not coming up as click on links, whatever.
ORIGIN OF "A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS:exclamation:"(or Ten Thousand, you decide)
Meaning
A picture tells a story as well as a large amount of descriptive text.
Origin
This phrase emerged in the USA in the early part of the 20th century. Its introduction is widely attributed to Frederick R. Barnard, who published a piece commending the effectiveness of graphics in advertising with the title "One look is worth a thousand words", in Printer's Ink, December 1921. Barnard claimed the phrase's source to be oriental by adding the text "so said a famous Japanese philosopher, and he was right".
Printer's Ink printed another form of the phrase in March 1927, this time suggesting a Chinese origin:
http://i42.tinypic.com/t7n52a.jpg
"Chinese proverb. One picture is worth ten thousand words."
The arbitrary escalation from 'one thousand' to 'ten thousand' and the switching from Japan to China as the source leads us to smell a rat with this derivation. In fact, Barnard didn't introduce the phrase - his only contribution was the incorrect suggestion that the country of origin was Japan or China. This has led to another popular belief about the phrase, i.e. that it was coined by Confucius. It might fit the Chinese-sounding 'Confucius he say' style, but the Chinese derivation was pure invention.
Many things had been thought to be 'worth ten thousand words' well before pictures got in on the act. For example:
"One timely deed is worth ten thousand words" - The Works of Mr. James Thomson, 1802.
"That tear, good girl, is worth, ten thousand words" - The Trust: A Comedy, in Five Acts, 1808.
"One fact well understood by observation, and well guided development, is worth a thousand times more than a thousand words" - The American Journal of Education, 1858.
The idea that a picture can convey what might take many words to express was voiced by a character in Ivan S. Turgenev's novel Fathers and Sons, 1862:
"The drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages in a book."
A similar idea was seen very widely in the USA from the early 20th century, in adverts for Doan's Backache Kidney Pills, which included a picture of a man holding his back and the text "Every picture tells a story".
http://i41.tinypic.com/2hmotgk.jpg
Neither of the above led directly to 'a picture is worth a thousand words'. Who it was who married the 'worth ten thousand words' with 'picture' isn't known, but we do know that the phrase is American in origin. It began to be used quite frequently in the US press from around the 1920s onward. The earliest example that I can find is from the text of an instructional talk given by the newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club, in March 1911:
"Use a picture. It's worth a thousand words."
Source: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/a-picture-is-worth-a-thousand-words.html