Strawberry box
But by shaping our common visual language, we developed signs, so-called cliches, which deserve special attention in semantics, study of a meaning. Cliche is an expression, an idea, or an element that has been used to the point of losing its original meaning or effect. When we can see that the original was substituted by some sort of image of the original. To make my point stronger let’s once again use an example. Here is the content of one box of strawberries I bought on the market.
Each of them looks very different from the mental picture you have in mind, when I would ask you to think of a strawberry. So the image we have, which was shaped by earlier depictions of the fruit, is different from a real strawberry from the market. It even goes further and makes these strawberries cheaper, because their look doesn’t correspond with “real” strawberries which have a smooth surface and are without imperfections. And I give one example but we should remember that every object has its representational look which could be different from its original. We got used to operate with these cliches and take it as real, but I think that a certain awareness should take place, if we want to develop skills in visual literacy. Cliches can also be seen as shortcuts, which can be used to transmit a meaning without extra layers of information and occur because its specifics and details.