[dmckeon]

And it sometime appears that almost every icon system is its own special snowflake, unique more for its creator's convenience, with more creativity than reusability.

The result is more like having dozens or hundreds of different dialects of Esperanto - each system intends to be rational and useful, but the overall effect on users of multiple icon systems is more like cacophony than expressive consistency.

OTOH, the core challenge of using text labels is finding texts that work and are meaningful and reasonably consistent across dozens of written natural languages.