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I disagree about the pause button. It works equally well without context. This is anecdotal, but I have seen it successfully used in charades to mean "pause."

Now, your comparison to the hamburger menu does make sense, and I agree. However, the context for the hamburger menu might be "button that's alone" and it just means "menu." I can see that catching on.

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People keep making this argument, but forgetting that context exists in the environment as well. In the context of charades, you're playing a game. It's something that's ongoing.

Now if we took out all the stop signs and replaced them with a pause symbol with yellow and black text (thus erasing the existing contextual clues we use for stop signs), we'd see how clearly context matters to symbol recognition.

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