| Summary: | This article follows the trail of the figurative dialect of professional groups, made up of pictures and visual codes rather than idioms, values, habits and beliefs. In some ways, any professional group has to develop at some point a visual mean of representing its own activity. This visual symbol must be both recognizable by outsiders and acceptable for its members, and even capable of fostering mutual identification and group cohesiveness. The solution to these prerequisites is often found in the representing of tools of the trade (or other attribute of the activity), which functions metonymically as a representation of the professional itself or the whole profession. This process, which seems generally specific to professional groups, can be observed in old communities of various cultures, from Egyptians scribes to Middle-Ages craftsmen or contemporary professions striking against Macron’s bill. This article tries to delimit the structural basis of this dialect (the ways in which an object or a tool is made up to be a symbol or emblem of a collective), and its characteristic contents linked to a wish for assertiveness from groups, a pursuit of religious salvation, or a more controversial to represent itself (through over-glorification of the trade, or the staging of tools and attributes amidst collective action).
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