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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/44215
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/44215
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

If it is a well known symbol, I sincerely doubt it; unless you are writing a farce or comedy.

The issue is I don't think the reader can divorce themselves from the symbol triggering the well-known meaning. As an example, for an American, "FBI" means one thing, it is a symbol. No matter what you do in your book or movie, "FBI" is going to trigger the well-known meaning, period. They may also remember you want it to mean something different, but that will be a secondary thought. This is a physical, biological phenomenon: Neurons are and neural pathways are **physical** things and cannot be un-grown or put aside for the purpose of your story; they **are** going to fire and trigger their mental models of the **real**"FBI" whether you like it or not.

The same goes for visual symbols. The swastika used to mean other things, some of them spiritual, but once it became appropriated as the symbol of Fascist Germany under Hitler; forget it. You will never supplant that meaning or prevent that meaning from being triggered; the swastika will likely represent Hitler's Germany for many centuries. The same goes for the Christian Cross, the Hammer and Sickle for Communism, etc.

Now, this is a biological phenomenon you can _exploit_ in a farce or comedy movie. Say our human crew lands on an alien planet (or in the future) where raising the middle finger solo is a gesture to be taken as a compliment on your style. If not overdone, a writer could wring some laughs out of that, but that is **because** the audience is programmed to realize the dichotomy of the humans seeing one thing and the aliens meaning another, and perhaps vice versa; the aliens taking as a compliment what was intended as an angry insult. And then the humans get used to it, and come home and use it as a compliment which gets taken as an insult.

The only reason I can think one might do this is to force this dichotomy thinking in the reader, as we might want to do in comedy. Other than that, I'd use some imagination and come up with a unique signal. Or appropriate one that is not very well known at all; for example there is a ton of art and religion iconography that only a very tiny percentage of people would know is being used incorrectly or doesn't mean what you claim it means. If your alternative meaning isn't going to cause any cognitive dissonance in 98% of the audience, no big deal.

Original score: 3