What intrigue me the most about this lecture is the Rebus. A Rebus is like a puzzle where illustrations are used to represent words. Rebuses play with the pronunciation of a word to bring across a message.

I remember first learning about Rebuses in Secondary school during a module called Thinking. We not only learn how to decode and interpret rebuses, we also created our own. We learn that the same message could be illustrated differently yet because of the way we see things and our knowledge of the world, differently illustrated images can derive the same message. For example, “one in a million” can be illustrated as “milonelion” or “mil1lion”. Another example is :

As seen above, both rebuses look slightly different, but they point to the same message: “Top Secret”. This is because the word “secret” at the top of the chain are highlighted, only by different methods. But because of the way we associating things, like an arrow means emphasis and a circle means “this is the one”, we can still derive “Top Secret”.

There are so many possible rebuses in the world that it is almost impossible to say that one has seen it all. Rebuses can take the form of pure pictures/numbers/letters, there can even be a mix of everything. Creating a rebus is like create a piece of art, the possibilities of permutations are endless and every rebus is unique. Rebuses can come in any form, and the only limitation is what our mind can come up with.