Two Wartime Semioses: Empirical Validation of the Common Theory of Mat and the Comic

This short empirical note supplements The Common Theory of Mat and the Comic 10.5281/zenodo.17712902 by examining two natural experiments produced by the Russian-Ukrainian war. The two episodes — a 2014 football-fan chant and a 2022 military reply at Snake Island — demonstrate the spontaneous emergence of extremely compressed sign-forms. Their semantic density, pragmatic efficiency, and global recognizability provide strong empirical support for the theoretical claim that mat constitutes an optimal expressive unit under conditions of uncertainty, danger, and accelerated cognitive selection.