It was legendary how those who wanted Donald Trump’s attention had to use, as one report said, “Compelling visual material. Big fonts. With photos and graphics. In color.” Although this Trump anecdote is somewhat amusing, we all love big fonts and bigger pictures ourselves, especially in our youth.

After all, our ubiquitous TV is all pictures. Thoughts are not easy to put on the TV screen. In the last several decades, we are told that Hollywood’s movies have reduced their dialogues by a third, replacing the scenes with increased action. Less brain involvement and more visual spectacles.

The U.S. is sometimes called a “Graphic Society,” meaning that using pictures is more effective than using words for the American public. As a graphic society, indeed, virtually everything in America needs pictures to be understood and communicated. As in “eyewitness news,” we value seeing rather highly in America. Sayings like “Seeing is believing,” “Show me the money,” or “We need empirical evidence,” and so on are popular for that very reason. Our national habit simplifies everything, often complex ideas, into pictures whenever possible.

Communicating largely with pictures has its social functions. Our Recorder on Sept. 9 had its nature picture with a caption, “A photo worth at least 1,000 words,” meaning that much effect can be created just by showing pictures. Who needs all the elaborate words and imaginations, the saying implies, when you can just show a picture? Naturally, when we teach our children, we use a greater portion of the teaching material made up of pictures, like flash cards, then gradually shift the weight to more words and fewer pictures as their intellectual ability grows — a process Donald Trump obviously skipped.

But, in a more serious sense, what’s in a picture?

We know there are famous pictures, such as Mount Rushmore, Hitler, Einstein, Jesus. We tend to think of them as “famous pictures,” but we also recognize that they are famous because thousands upon thousands of words have already been written or spoken about each of them. The pictures merely summarize these words.

By themselves, these pictures, as famous as they are and recognizable instantly by so many, are nothing, mean nothing, tell nothing by themselves beyond being an “animal,” “vegetable” or “mineral.” Aside from the directions to restrooms, airports and so on, which are quite primitive — specifically one-purpose functional — pictures by themselves carry no special meaning.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but no picture is worth a thousand words unless the words have already been available about the picture. No picture is worth anything in human meaning unless there is a text, either in written down or orally transmitted words, to describe it. Pictures just don’t mean anything by themselves. None of these famous pictures would mean anything without their text-in-words narratives, as meaningless as the Mona Lisa to a French poodle or pearls to an Iowa pig.

Words require thoughts to process, but pictures, mere glances.

In America’s digital-graphic society, we see more and more pictures, including moving pictures, produced and consumed with little or no text to describe them. On TV and on computer screens of all varieties, we see virtually all pictures and little or no words summoned to explain what those pictures mean: Pretty women, shining new gadgets, faces of celebrities, and so on, with minimal or no explanations as to what they mean.

After one image or another, they parade absolutely meaningless pictures and more pictures. Without words, these pictures evoke a mere sensory response, usually a glance, and an appropriately primitive reaction proportional to the stimulation that the picture creates in the viewer, who moves onto the next such images.

Words translate pictures into meaning: They give meaning to pictures and make them come alive as something relevant to our real life beyond the sensory and transitory. Without words, we see pictures as cockroaches see pictures. We use pictures without text only for the simplest functional instructions, such as “Toilet,” “Hospital,” “Airport,” “Food,” “Diaper Change,” and so on.

In America’s graphic society, as actions have replaced thoughts, pictures (or emoticons) have replaced any sense of understanding. Multiple times a day we see pictures upon pictures with no human elaborations associated with them. We only know what we see because we have been reduced to children, quite incapable of thinking about anything beyond what they see. For without words no further thought can be formed or extracted.

What we see is what we get and no more. Thus, with the predominance of pictures, our intelligence suffers proportionally.

Life is not just lived in the sensory functions — eating and defecating and having fun in between. It is lived in complex words and thoughts, enriched by the words in our language. Without these words, and the thoughts they prompt in our brains, we are merely living the lives of toddlers with flash cards.

Social knowledge consists of a composite understanding of the constant flow of time and interactions in space. In time, our understanding is made up of our past, present and anticipated future. In space, our understanding is expanded by our interactions with different personas and places. A picture, on the other hand, represents one frozen moment in time and one fixed space that goes no further. We can react to pictures but we cannot reflect on them, for they allow no more play of our minds.

Ultimately, pictures are shortcuts of our daily routines: If we seek too many shortcuts in life, we will reach our graves without having lived at all.

Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.