This is a great argument for text over icons in design. I wonder if in 250 years people will still know what the 3 bars (hamburger?) icon did.
The texts that stand the test of time are the stories, ideas, and human history ... Things that people will still be interested in hundreds of years later.
Apparently its an old icon but I never really saw it (that I can recall) until mobile got popular.
I had a teacher in high school who thought the "graph" icon in Microsoft Word was "library books." She called it the "library books button." I guess 3 lines isn't enough information to convey meaning. Even though the button meant "put this information in graph form" she didn't see that the icon represented a bar graph.