The end of the freedom to smoke in public places in most western countries has been a boon to those of us who hate coming home in the evening smelling like an ashtray, but of course we know that it's created frustration for nicotine addicts and financial difficulties for people who run bars, kiosks, and small shops. But how many of us spare a thought for the poor old semioticians, left out on a limb after building their academic careers on painstaking studies of the meaning of smoking gestures, or elaborate deconstructions of the subtexts in cigarette advertising? You don't see any bars with a roped-off "semiotics area" outside the back door, do you...? Life has clearly been tough for many of them, forcing them to branch out into ephemeral and unproductive fields like emoji and cat-memes. Perhaps we should think of taking up a collection for them...

Using an imaginary dating couple, Ted and Cheryl — both of whom smoke like chimneys — for purposes of illustration, Danesi takes us reasonably briskly and painlessly through some of the main fields of study semiotics deals with: the cultural meanings tucked up in gesture and body-language, in dress and grooming, in language (with separate chapters on metaphor and narrative), in spaces, in the arts, in objects, and in popular culture. Jargon is kept to a minimum, whilst the history of ideas in each field is sketched out without going very deeply into the inevitable debates and disagreements. As it says on the tin, this is just an introduction, designed to give you an idea of what semiotics is and the sorts of things it works with. In this third edition, Danesi has taken account of new cultural phenomena like selfies, memes and emoji, but he doesn't seem to have pruned out things from earlier editions that have proved to be ephemeral (remember Pet Rocks and Cabbage-Patch dolls?).

The pace and the range of things covered means that the book sometimes comes across as a little slapdash, when he rushes into a subject and tries to summarise it in two or three pages. Thus, in the chapter on metaphor, he has the ardent lover Ted say “Your kisses are sweeter than wine, Cheryl,” and proceeds to examine this statement as though it's a straightforward association of the notions of sweetness and lovemaking, when of course it's really a phrase that Danesi (growing up in Canada in the fifties) has got from Pete Seeger, who adapted it from the Song of Songs. It's unlikely, after all, that the wine Ted and Cheryl were drinking on their date would have been sweet enough to provoke that particular comparison, unless it was meant ironically ("Your mouth tastes like the inside of a wine barrel, Cheryl."). Semiotics is all about being aware of that kind of cultural history, and it undermines what Danesi is trying to do if he elides it in his hurry to get to the end of the chapter. He gets into similar trouble in his chapter on clothing when he sees the modern business suit as the revenge of "Cromwell's descendants", the Puritans, for the Restoration. You can maybe get away with that sort of thing in a lecture, but if you're going to do it on paper, at least read the Wikipedia article on the English Civil War...

Readable and fun, but doesn't inspire much confidence. ( )

Reasonably clear introduction to ideas of semiotics. ( )