I remember being shocked when I realized that that swirl around a vertical line at the beginning of the Disney logo was something functional. I had this realization remarkably late. Same goes for the dramatic ribbon between the “The” and the “ay” in the Hudson’s Bay Company logo.
Figure 1:
Figure 2:
It just never occurred to me to think about it. Even though I’d known how to read for a while before it dawned on me, I’m not sure I ever actually read as opposed to just recognized the word.
I guess my point is that familiarity strips back perceptiveness, which makes sense. The actual particular qualities of a thing recede as the thing becomes just the totality of the conceptual abstraction it comes to represent to you (all the things and feelings that Disney stands for to a kid / all the things and feelings The Bay stands for to a Canadian kid). And if you can’t remember the process by which you became familiar with a thing, without a conscious effort not to be, you’re basically oblivious to it.
Good example I hadn’t noticed at all until it was pointed out in the NYT Magazine piece about this dude’s trip to Disney World that ran a few weekends ago:
Next memory: suddenly being able to hear, for the first time, the Irishness of Disney’s name, hearing it spoken aloud in my head with the thick Kilkenny accent of his own great-grandfather, Arundel Disney, with a sharp uptake on the last syllable. And being able to understand the essentially tragic nature of his charlatanism a little better.
