Do you recognize this symbol?
Chances are that the answer is yes. But what is it? Is it an S? An 8? A sideways infinity sign?
You’ve probably seen it in children’s notebooks and on graffitied walls, or maybe you even like to draw it yourself? That’s because for over a century this symbol has been replicated in classrooms and on walls in every continent (well, except for Antarctica). And It’s even found in places which don’t use the Roman alphabet. Though pattern is universal in the sense that it can be found everywhere, no one can be sure when or how it originated, or even what it symbolizes. Can we really consider it a symbol if its meaning is unknown? Or is it simply symbolic of our propensity to replicate and an obsession with symmetry?
If there is no explicit meaning then perhaps it can be better labelled a ‘meme’, a term which was coined by the public intellectual Richard Dawkins in his seminal work from 1976 The Selfish Gene—a man who I unfortunately failed to see speak at St Andrews in 2018. In this book, Dawkins seeks to explain why some ideas, even those which are dangerous or trivial, like martyrdom for example, continue to persist and proliferate. What he argues is that ideas, regardless of their merit, are in constant competition to survive in a state of natural selection. These ideas can spread like viruses, unconcerned with the wellbeing of their hosts (I.E. penance and martyrdom) and the term meme itself is derived from the Greek “mimeme”, meaning something imitated or viral. Thus, this ‘Universal S’ should be thought of not as a symbol, but rather as a meme, because it has no apparent meaning or utility, yet like a virus it continues to persist.
With the advent of the internet and mass media this memetic phenomenon has become even more apparent and it seems that no matter where we look our image world is already mediated. In fact, the word meme has become entirely associated with the internet, even if it’s not a uniquely digital. There are a few other pre-digital examples of memes which come to mind, like Kilroy, a WW2 era graffiti cartoon of unknown origin.
I don’t have the time in this post to explain the entire (albeit short) history of the Universal S and the search for its origins, but I’ll try and give a short summary of evidence thus far and the leading theories.
Perhaps the most plausible theory is that the S was an easily replicated pattern to be included into textiles, carvings, and other designs which may have stretched back to the middle ages or even before, possibly representative of the ancient symbol of infinity or the ouroboros (snake eating itself). However, it’s hard to find concrete evidence of this is.
Another theory is that the S was simply a geometric puzzle included in challenge books from the 19th and 20th century. These books, such as matchstick books, may have for example asked you to “draw an S or an eight using 14 lines or matchsticks.” This challenge then would have been shared between classmates, families, and co-workers as a way to pass time. And without any inherent symbolic meaning or use past this, no one would have ever taken the time to formally document its origins or spread.
The most comprehensive study I could find therefore comes from the Scandinavian youtuber, Lemmino, who spent years exploring puzzle books, forums, and graffiti. Though he can’t be sure where the S originated, the earliest use he could find was in an engineering guide pamphlet from 1890. Lemmino also discovered another important usage of two Universal S’s in artist Jean-Michel Basquiat’s seminal work, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Derelict.
Because the Universal S is so insignificant, it has gone more or less undetected in academia and formal channels. In fact, the only theory relating to the S I could find from an academic came from Paul Cobley, a professor of Language and Media at Middelsex University who offers a simple, yet insightful argument that the S spread so far because “It’s fun to draw”. And maybe this is the answer to such an unimportant question.