And for me that's all true. If someone says "old world porcupines..." I'll start thinking, well, what makes them tick? I'm also interested in what those thoughts could look like on paper. I guess from that what resides uppermost in my experience is that if I have to explain the concept behind the image, then I have spoken in the wrong language and if not that then with the wrong audience.

Having said that, it is usually intuition that drives my response to a problem. As for explanations that use visual words; here is an interesting thing. The only letters that need to be positioned cloctrey in a wrod for it to be usnodrertod are the fsrit and lsat. If the inebewetn lrettes are jubmled the mnaineg can slitl be wkeord out by the barin.

Hmmm...

...there's a connection here between what I meant earlier about an image needing to be concise enough to wordlessly explain it's meaning to the viewer, and the visual word not needing to be concisely arranged to be understood. But I'm not sure what the link is.

Something about a picture painting a thousand words perhaps?