compared to spoken language due to the visual natural of sign languages. However, the structure of sign languages also puts limits to the degree of iconicity: From a truly iconic language one would expect that a concept like SMILING would be expressed by mimiking a smile (i.e., by performing a smiling face). All known sign languages, however, do not express the concept of SMILING by a smiling face, but by a manual sign. Poetry Iconicity often occurs within poetry through the use of onomatopoeia, which may be called auditory iconicity. Sometimes the form of the poem resembles or enacts the poem's content, and in this case, a visual iconicity is present. One poet well known for his visual poems, and therefore visual iconicity, is E. E. Cummings. A subset of visual iconicity involves a spatial iconicity. For instance, in Cummings's grasshopper poem ("r-p-o-p-h-e-s-s-a-g-r") the word "arriving" begins on the far right of the poem with the "a", the "r" is near the middle of the poem, and the rest of the word is on the left of the poem. The reader must travel a great distance across the poem, therefore, in order to "arrive". The spatial dimension, then, can relate to a temporal dimension. In the poems "The Fish" and "The Moose" by Elizabeth Bishop, temporal iconicity is at work. The amount of time it takes to read "The Fish" coincides with the length of time a fish could live outside of water; likewise, the duration of the long bus ride in "The Moose" coincides with the poem's long first sentence as well as the twenty-some stanzas it takes before the passengers on the bus (and the reader) actually encounters the moose. Folk etymology Iconicity occurs in rejective phono-semantic matching. "Consider Lithuanian Ashkenazic Hebrew רע דם ra dom (cf. Yiddish ra dam), lit. 'of bad blood' (from Hebrew רע דם ra` dam 'of bad blood'). This is a toponymic rejective phono-semantic matching of Polish Radom, the name of a town in Poland (approximately south of Warsaw), or of its Yiddish adaptation ródem (see Uriel Weinreich 1955: 609, Paul Wexler 1991: 42). Thus, if a pogrom had occurred in Radom, it would surely have been rationalized by ra dam ‘of bad blood’. Obviously, providing such an etymythological explanation for the pogrom was regarded by some Jews as a mere play on words. However, others might have conceived of ra dam as