Only the angry admire vandals. I missed the element of threat in subway scratch-names the sense, almost, of someone coming into my home and drawing lines on my walls. Graffiti is an invasion a literary invasion, by words. It expresses the threat inherent in all words. And words CAN do harm.
Any word can be a threat.
In graffiti, words have left captivity left the page and run wild, like dogs who have escaped domestic life and formed packs in the hills. According to an article in The New York Times , the written alphabet began as graffiti. Semitic laborers in Egypt needed an alternative to hieroglyphics, which required years of training to read, and was mostly used by priests. This new alphabetic language first appeared scratched into stone, much as TEAL is scratched on plastic windows of the F train. The urge to deface a wall is as old as walls themselves.