In some email correspondence with a friend this evening she told me that the part of the world she was in was experiencing a typhoon. This got me to thinking about the word "typhoon" and how attractive it is. This then led me to consider it as a candidate for a car name such as the "Nissan Typhoon". (Shortly after this, I discovered that the Ford company had beaten Nissan to this innocuous and yet incongruous name for a motor vehicle). I was considering the "Ford Hurricane" (and found the Jeep company had already made a speculative semiotic investment there). I have come up with the similarly incongruous automobile monikers of the Toyota Climate Change, the Hyundai Tsunami and the Suzuki Pandemic.
On the concept of semiotics: Hong Kong by night is such a beautiful splendour of signs and symbols that, other than being certifiably hazardous to the epileptic amongst us (if somewhat less so than a nocturnal Las Vegas or Times Square), it allows us to marvel at the richness, depth and complexity of human sign-making activity. I choose Hong Kong because my Cantonese is limited to very few words indeed and the alien nature of the visual aspect of the language underlines the density of meaning - here conspicuous by its partial absence: I know these signs represent something, I just know not what.
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