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Saturday, August 27, 2011
ICON
The word icon came from Latin who got it from the Greek, which meant “likeness” and showed up in English as early as 1572. The Eastern Orthodox Church used images of saints and martyrs as part of their holy lexicon, painted on wooden panels, and called them icons. In 1952, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word crept into usage as a person that is looked up to. Now the word is thrown around by the media, movie critics, real estate agents, car salesman, and tv newsmen, describing everything and everyone who has a heartbeat as an icon. If you looked up its meaning in 20 dictionaries, one out of 20 would describe it as an object of ”uncritical affection and devotion.” It has become the American “in” way to describe something or somebody that is “Cool”. It has lost all meaning, and says more about the user, their lack of a prolific vocabulary. The most outrageous recent example of misuse of the word happened when Chris Matthews, tv commentator described the BP oil spill as an “iconic catastrophe.” It doesn’t get more sophomoric than his blatant display of excessive verbiage. When a real estate agent calls a patch of dirt, “iconic”, buyer beware. Bob Dylan, poet and songwriter, master of language, defined icon as “another word for a washed-up has-been”. Watch for the word, it pops up everywhere. Playboy called a porn star an icon and a sex symbol an icon, and when you see its pompous display, replace the word with “moron”, it rhymes and will give one a sense of the poetry and comic relief of human ignorance.
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