People from all over the world have been drawing this S-shaped symbol for decades, yet no one seems to know anything about it. In this video, I explore some of the popular origin theories and showcase my own findings after five years of on and off searching.
𝐂𝐫𝐞𝐝𝐢𝐭𝐬, 𝐫𝐞𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞𝐬, 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞
𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐏𝐚𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐨𝐧
𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭 𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐧 𝐘𝐨𝐮𝐓𝐮𝐛𝐞
𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥𝐬
Bluesky:
[Credits, References, and More]
https://www.lemmi.no/p/the-universal-s
It is Ouroboros.
5:20 I started laughing so loud I cackled
the ambassadors painting from the early 1500s has the symbol bro
I can finally contribute something! I last ex-boyfriend is from a background where you think he might not have known this. He’s in his 40s, and he grew up in a remote village in Russia and didn’t have access to the internet until he went to college in the city.
When his parents both passed away in 2020. He and his siblings were going through their parents’ stuff, and found a lot of their former childhood possessions that their parents kept. Guess what symbol he had drawn on a lot of his notebooks from middle school?
5:30 hey, I was just starting to get goosebumbs! 😀
11:06 i love how he's turning the danish flag into Swedish
yo great video bro
youre impressive
We have smiliarly widespread doodle in Germany that is a little house with a cross in the middle and the challenge is to draw it in one continous line without lifting the pen. It's called "Haus vom Nikolaus", and the number of strokes is the same as in the phrase "Das ist das Haus vom Ni-ko-laus.", so 8 strokes. (This is the house of Saint Nicholas.)
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I didn't do the S. Instead, I did like a long chain version of it. The digonal lines were the same, but it was lots of vertical lines in a column across the whole page. Think of it like a long chain or a weave/woven pattern like a braid with 45° angles instead of smooth lines. I would also often use different colours. I learned it from my older brother, he was born in 1990 and I was born in '96.
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(ASCII aproximation, one small diagonal line is missing of course.)
For your information, I am from Germany.
Oh, he mentioned it at 7:46 anyway.
Don't watch his brainwashed video about jfk, this guy is from swedistan 😂 an absolute joke
Can we get a 2.0 version 😩
I drew it in junior high and remember it being the "Stussy" brand logo. I am shocked that it's so universal and mysterious!!! Great video! Thank you for your hard work!
It was the Stussy logo. YouTuber guy here has a terrible memory. 😂
It’s just graffiti.
This is what graffiti does.
It spreads around the world.
I really respect the amount of effort you put into every video and topic, even if said topic is nonsense, but is still interesting
I felt so cool when I realized I could do it without messing up in 7th grade (1986,in Jersey)
I was born in the 60s in Canada. We didn't have the top and bottom pointed. We made them round, closer to the 1890s version.
It’s 100% graffiti
I remembered this as a long video. Crazy to come back and realise it's not even 19 minutes 🤯
BRO WHAT THE ACTUAL FACT!
I saw the word Stussy on a computer screen somewhere, and the only stussy i know is the Character in Onepiece…. but bro…..Nah i think someone is mind controlling me.
My autograph? ✍️
S = 19 = 10 = 1
In Angola we used to call it the money sign $
It was in Angola Africa as well
Hello, who could i get in contact with about donating to you for the great video you put together?
I’m a teacher and my students wanted to show me something cool and new that they “invented” – it was the s symbol. They were disappointed to hear that I too used to do that when I was younger
Is the reality Simulation logo
I’m late- but this was a great video. Funny, clever guy.
I’d give credit to graffiti artists tbh that’s where I’ve always seen them appear besides school
Frost Children – Sister
I just found one embossed in a metal door lock behind a CVS. It's some kind of branding. I have photos if anyone cares.
I’m from Tunisia and I’ve drawn this symbol in school between 2000-2010. It was one of the things you would scribble when bored in class. Squared paper notebooks were the standard and that made it very easy to draw this symbol, you would just follow the lines.
Look up the Painting called "The Ambassadors" by Hans Holbein. Look at the table cloth they rest their arms on. This was painted in 1533 👀👀
As a Greek I can confirm we used to draw it as Smile with the tree! Also, it was the same time with Fido Dido of 7Up. I was convinced that the S and Fido Dido were connected.
1985 p.s. 63 lower east side new york city everybody was drawing it…
You could do an infinite chain of s’s too if you added more lines under the original 6 instead of the v at the bottom and just kept going like that.
It's the Southmead "s" everyone knows that. BS10.
I always thought it was the PlayStation Symbol from back when PS2 or PS1
The sign predates 1980, check Constantin Brancusi the colum of infinity
The universal S is actually $. This is more like the high-school S
This symbol came from a skate company back in the 90s, called Senate one of the best companies ever around had some of the most popular clothing at the time
8
Its not an S. Its a symbol from the first language. The prime language of the species.
My name starts with s.. i thought i made it up
No way we had it here in Africa too
We usually call it a Graffiti S in my part of England. The first time I ever saw it was around 2007-ish. A few boys in my year group picked it up from local street graffiti and started drawing it everywhere. From there, it quickly spread throughout the entire school. It basically became an unspoken rule that you had to know how to draw it and had to pass it down to the new students starting school every year. I find it quite strange now that not once did I ever question this weird, S worshipping cult of schoolchildren.
The S keeps going like a chain, it's just square lined textbooks for math, you fill in the lines and then you cross and it looks like an S. You keep going and it looks like a chain. It's just common impulse to go fill in the lines when you're bored in class and there you have it, the universal S.
It's a symbol for infinity the neverending figure 8 it's a 3d image