Two U.K. artists, Felix Heyes and Ben West, have created a dictionary of roughly 21,000 images, compiled by using the first image to appear in a Google image search for each word in an "average" lexicon. You can see a slide show and brief story at the Huffington Post.
Is anyone else reminded of the philosophers from the Grand Academy of Lagado in Gulliver's Travels, who attempt to reduce all words to things?
Gulliver reports, "...since words are only names for things, it would be more convenient for all men to carry about with them such things as were necessary to express the particular benefits they were to discourse on....if a man's business be very great and of various kinds, he must be obliged, in proportion, to carry a greater bundle of things upon his back, unless he can afford one or two strong servants to attend him.
"I have often beheld two of these sages, almost sinking under the weight of their packs, like pedlars among us; who, when they met in the streets, would lay down their loads, open their sacks, and hold conversation for an hour together; then put up their implements, help one another resume their burdens, and take their leave."
In other words, Jonathan Swift invented the smart phone.
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