There’s a strange cultural artifact that unites us, a low-stakes hieroglyph that transcends generations, geographies, and even subcultures. It’s not a song or a movie or a fashion trend. It’s an S. Not just any S, though—a very specific S. You know the one. Six straight lines, two stacked triangles, and suddenly, you were Picasso with a pencil. Every middle school desk in America bore its mark, every notebook margin carried its banner. If aliens ever excavate our ruins, they might think we worshipped it. Maybe we did.
The mystery of this S lies not in its design but in its ubiquity. It didn’t have a name, an origin story, or a corporate sponsor. Nobody taught you how to draw it. It just appeared one day, fully formed, like a Platonic ideal of graffiti. You were in math class, staring at your friend’s notebook, when you saw it for the first time. “What is that?” you asked, as if it were some ancient sigil. And then they showed you. Six lines. Connect the dots. Fill in the angles. Boom. It wasn’t art; it was initiation.
And yet, for all its omnipresence, nobody knows where it came from. Some say it was a relic of ‘80s skater culture. Others claim it was born in the logo of Stüssy or maybe a rogue Metallica font. There are entire Reddit threads devoted to this question, each theory more speculative than the last. But the truth? The truth doesn’t matter. The S wasn’t about where it came from—it was about where it went.
It went on trapper keepers and sneakers, on skateboards and lunch tables, on the back of your hand when you were bored in history class. It was the first thing you learned to draw that felt cool, the universal language of suburban rebellion. You didn’t know how to play guitar or ollie on a skateboard, but damn it, you could draw that S. And in a world where being cool felt like a secret club you’d never get into, that S was the password, the one thing that let you pretend you belonged.
Now, decades later, it’s absurdly nostalgic. You’ll see it in a meme or stumble across an old notebook, and it hits you like the first riff of a song you forgot you loved. That stupid S is shorthand for a simpler time—a time when your biggest problem was the bus ride home and your greatest achievement was figuring out how to turn it into a chain. It wasn’t just an S. It was a symbol. Of what? Who knows. But for a fleeting moment, it made us all feel like we were part of something bigger than ourselves.
