Context matters. I think it's acceptable for that icon to mean 'list' in one context, and 'justify' in another. Using it to mean 'menu' is a little confusing though. Sure, there's a list of menu items, but in the context of Facebook it looks a lot more like a list of posts – i.e., newsfeed.
Has the author never heard of context sensitivity before? Somehow I've never had this problem understanding what that button would do in a given context.
This is exactly the way language works: words can have multiple senses, from which the context should pick out the one intended. If you look up common words, you'll find they have a multitude of different senses (sometimes unrelated). In fact, the more frequent a word is, the more senses it is likely to have.
My Algorithms lecturer called it the "equivils" symbol, as in "like equals but meaning exactly equivalent to".<p>I thought that was a standard name until I tried to use it around someone from a different university. I had to google it to prove I wasn't crazy, and when google came up with only four random hits, I was forced to concede that I may well in fact be crazy after all.<p>I can't decide if he thought equivils was the best name for it, or if he was just trying to make it so we couldn't google solutions to his assignments...
It seems that some people use it to represent something that you can have traction on, like for dragable items (the slide to open camera on the iphone lock screen and the dragable reording from the writer's example).
Three things means "many". In this case three lines means "many lines".<p>In view as list, the files are displayed as each file on a line. In justify the text goes from being snippets of various sizes to being a bunch of full lines. In drag to reorder the many lines make you think of ribbed texture of that thing you can drag against. In settings when you tap on many lines, you arrive at a screen that has many lines of settings.
It's fairly clear in most cases, except Facebook's usage. It took me forever to figure out what was going on in Facebook's app.<p>The much worse icon-fail imho is the "share" concept.
<a href="http://cl.ly/2j1a40461E1B2U0X2W2q" rel="nofollow">http://cl.ly/2j1a40461E1B2U0X2W2q</a> <-- Apple's version is ok, but doesn't seem like "share" and there are many much worse.
Forgot about the one in Google Docs at the bottom of a Spreadsheet that means "View all sheets"<p><a href="http://f.cl.ly/items/0d3o3R0n3z2n2D3P250G/Screen%20Shot%202012-06-15%20at%2010.59.08%20AM.png" rel="nofollow">http://f.cl.ly/items/0d3o3R0n3z2n2D3P250G/Screen%20Shot%2020...</a>
As with everything else in UI and interface design.<p>What is learned is what is intuitive. There are no silver bullets, no objective meaning of things. Only an acquired understanding.<p>All attempts to use metaphors to make understanding of functionality easier are basically in a war for acceptance and adoption.<p>It is perfectly reasonable to us it to mean those things if that becomes the standard.
Context matters.<p>Also, there's also the simple "If Apple, Twitter and Facebook do it, bad luck, we gotta play along" rule.<p>P.S. Starting with "While I may be far from a UX guy" doesn't seem like the most positive way to start an article.<p>P.P.S. Somewhat flattered that oursay.org was used - somewhat badly - in the final example.
The use as a menu button dates back at least to the Sidekick II: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SidekickII.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SidekickII.jpg</a> (though that has one long and 2 short lines).
Those rag icons, while common, are just oversimplified. It's good enough for word processing, but ideally your set would be something more like:<p>|≡| (justify full)<p>While it <i>could</i> still be a list, it associates much better with alignment.
Interesting post, and I think the Bootstrap example might be the least reasonable of the bunch, but certainly as a “list”, “justify”, or “vertical drag” icon I have never found it confusing.
There's a couple of multi-purpose, kitchen sink icons. You have the lines, the cog, the star, the plus, the dot and maybe a few others. What they mean is "I wasn't creative enough to come up with a better icon so I'm just going to dump the kitchen sink of miscellany behind this vague and non-specific icon and let context do the rest".
I would have googled "three horizontal lines" but interesting post nevertheless. From the maths prospective;<p>" A symbol with three horizontal line segments ( ) resembling the equals sign is used to denote both equality by definition (e.g., means is defined to be equal to ) and congruence (e.g., means 13 divided by 12 leaves a remainder of 1--a fact known to all readers of analog clocks)."<p><a href="http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Equal.html" rel="nofollow">http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Equal.html</a>
><i>Even worse is when the offending design is completely out of your control, like the kerning on the sign at the Court st. subway station.</i><p>Don't see anything wrong with the kerning. It's not a typeset document, anyway, it's made by some craftman and/or artist as tiles, and this is the placement that he picked.<p>It's not like a bad poster made in Word with letter clinging together or something...
The root problem is that there's no central authority from which all wisdom and official validity flows. There's just a bunch of people. Anyone's free to scribble out whatever and then decide it means whatever. This is just a case of a collision between two or more domain-specific symbol paradigms in a single UX space.