&gt; I have Age - 6 years of experience reading, I have far less than that with whatever icon you come up with.<p>When I mean icons are a language, I literally mean that they&#x27;re a language, in that there&#x27;s a lineage and history of these languages.<p>For example, I bet you have decades of experience recognizing the 3.5&quot; diskette &#x27;save&#x27; icon, and a similar familiarity with the landline phone receiver as symbolizing &#x27;phone&#x27;. These are icons that are part of a shared language, so it&#x27;s safe to say that using them will be instantly recognizable, despite the fact most people don&#x27;t use floppy disks or landlines anymore.<p>If a company decides to use a new icon that&#x27;s not easily recognized, it&#x27;s like trying to introduce new language; it has to be done smoothly, otherwise most users will not understand what it means. This is not a problem unique to icons; it&#x27;s a problem across languages.<p>If I had a new command-line tool that, instead of `.&#x2F;cmtool --verbose`, I implemented `.&#x2F;cmtool --consult` or `.&#x2F;cmtool --magicify`, you&#x27;d have to `man cmtool` in order to understand what the commands mean. This is because &#x27;--verbose&#x27; is a flag that&#x27;s common oft-used enough to be understood, generally, what it means, while &#x27;magicify&#x27; or &#x27;consult&#x27; are ambiguous and rarely used. This confusion has nothing to do with the nature that the UI is text-based (vs. icon-based), and everything to do with the fact that user interfaces, like a language, involves shared conventions.