Cha-ching

No, this is not the sound of a cash register ringing up a sale, although I guess it could be. It is the sound of a bell ringing, a bicycle bell. In America you don’t hear bicycle bells often, or at least I don’t hear them. When I’m walking around my campus I usually can hear the sound of bike tires and feel the person coming up on me from behind.


In Japan, however, it’s common for bike riders to warn you of their presence with a bell. When my wife and son and I were in Kyoto, we regularly heard this sound from the bicyclists who crowded the sidewalks as we walked around the city visiting the famous temples, shrines, and gardens.

The other time I regularly heard bicycle bells was during the long distance brevet in France from Paris to Brest and back to Paris. On the PBP is it a custom to have a bell that you ring as you pass other cyclists who are riding in the event. Not everyone had a bell, but there were enough that I still heard them frequently.

One of the interesting things to me about bells of this sort is that they communicate as signs rather than symbols. A sign is something that happens which indicates something other than itself and can be interpreted. The bells in both of these contexts indicate the presence of a cyclist, the first as a sort of warning and the second as a sort of celebration. Both humans and other animals communicate at the level of signs. But other animals don't use symbols as far as I know. I'm sure this is debatable with respect to dophins and maybe whales.

The difference between a sign and a symbol is that a symbol has a referent. Jeremy Bentham said that “a word is the sign of a thought.” The word “bell” refers to the thing on the bicycle that rings, and it allows me or you or any other person to talk about this thing. With words as signs of thought we communicate about things when the things themselves have come and gone. The words gather our memories together of walks through busy streets or passing fellow cyclists in the rain and darkness. “Cha-ching” on the other hand just calls our attention to a bike coming our way, so that we can move out of the way or celebrate by responding “Allez.”