Just say “recognizable”
Ok so I was reading a story about COVID measures in California and there’s a photo of the Bay Bridge in San Francisco seen between two rows of buildings, with the caption:
California Street, usually filled with iconic cable cars, is seen mostly empty in San Francisco, California on March 17, 2020.
And I was annoyed. Cable cars are not iconic! Neither are movie stars, or shoes, or apartment buildings, or the Space Needle, or the Grand Canyon. “Iconic” is not another word for famous or recognizable or familiar. That’s not what it means.
I know, I know, that is what it means now, because usage is what counts, but it isn’t, and I hate it.
I saw one yesterday that also set me off: it was on an ad for a flashy new apartment building in Seattle, of which some 5 million have been built over the last few years.
As the tallest residential building in Seattle, this iconic tower is home to a collection of ultra luxury apartment residences.
What’s iconic about it?! They don’t say. Here it doesn’t even mean “familiar”; it’s just a fancy word for expensive.
So I was ranting about it and a friend handed me this to keep me quiet for a few minutes:
Can we please give the word “iconic” a rest? These days, you can’t pick up a newspaper, click on some website, turn on a f*%$@* TV without reading about something or someone that is iconic. Once upon a time, the now infernal word (hey, let’s use “infernal” more) was relegated to the lexicon of overzealous art history professors who used words like “musculature” while they groped a Greek sculpture on display at the university art museum. Those were the days.
This is what I’m saying. It was an art history word. It had a particular, narrow meaning, and it didn’t come up more than a couple of times a year. People weren’t running around talking about their iconic new espresso machine or puffa jacket.
Type the word “iconic” into your favorite search engine and voila, nearly 200,000 articles about an “iconic gadget,” “iconic comedian,” “iconic art,” “Jamie Foxx’s iconic thriller,” “iconic summer,” “Madonna’s iconic pose,” “Miami’s iconic hotels,” “England’s iconic chimney stacks.”
How about England’s iconic toilet flusher pulls? Now those are iconic.
I’m kidding; they’re not.
Webster’s Dictionary defines iconic:
1. Relating to, resembling, or having the character of an icon or (Fine Arts & Visual Arts / Art Terms) (of memorial sculptures, esp those depicting athletes of ancient Greece) having a fixed conventional style
2. A conventional religious image typically painted on a small wooden panel and used in the devotions of Eastern Christians
To do with an actual, literal icon, in short.
I’m not alone in my revulsion toward “iconic,” either. Even the venerable British tabloid The Telegraph selected “iconic” among their list of “words that should be banned because they have lost their meaning and have become useless.” But that was nearly five years ago, and instead of retiring the word to the rafters, millions of unworthy icons or iconic people have appeared… like locusts. Just watch Inside Edition any day of the week and “follow Miss USA as she fulfills her life-long dream of recreating an iconic scene from Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” followed quickly by Deborah Norville speaking with iconic film producer Harvey Weinstein.”
They don’t call Harvey Weinstein iconic any more, but that’s not because they’ve found out what the word means.
iknklast, time for a new nym, quick, before Ophelia chooses one for you!
Ha!
So you’ve got an iconic bridge, an iconic tram, an iconic apartment building. Big deal.
We have got THE ICONIC. So there!
Did any one else hear about this discovery announced a couple of days ago?
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/amazon-rainforest-ice-age-paintings-scli-intl/index.html
Eight miles of Ice Age rock art found in Columbia. Apparently there are depictions of now-extinct megafauna.
My own bone to pick: some stories are calling it “cave art” but all of the examples I’ve seen online have been open air sites.
I don’t think they use the word “iconic” anywhere in this article…
Hmmm…I don’t use iconic with the abandon that you cite, but I do use it for more than Greek statues and triptychs. My usage is informed by computer GUIs, which call those little square images on the screen “icons”. It has to do with a pictorial language that communicates not so much by convention (although that can be part of it) but by being evocative in a compelling–often emotional–way. It’s kind of like a caricature of a person or a good joke: the proof is that you recognize it without having to have it explained.
There is this cartoonist, Clay Bennett. In separate communication, I wrote:
Bennett has a graphic style that can make the pedestrian iconic, or the iconic pedestrian, depending on the needs of the cartoon. I thought this one was pretty good. https://www.gocomics.com/claybennett/2020/10/27
I still cringe a little at ‘decadent’ for luxuriously self-indulgent.
We don’t seem to have a word specifically for something strongly or uniquely associated with a particular place like like San Francisco’s cable cars. ‘Landmark’ works for stationary objects like buildings and natural features, but not cable cars or London cabs, or even views characterized by many physical structures such as Las Vegas neon.
Just some insomniac musing.
Stabat Mater Extra Fenestram?
Don’t get me started on ‘synonymous’.
“Unique” gets me the same way. Most of the time people use it, they actually mean that what they’re describing is unusual or distinctive in some way. As in, “They’re doing something really unique with this project, and it’s just so unique.”
I have been given contract requirements for building design work with the word ‘iconic’ in them. I always have to go back to the client to say DUDE YOU ARE GOING TO HAVE TO DEFINE THIS.
Personally I`m more annoyed by the way the word ”humanitarian” is used as a more fancy word for ”human”, even to the point of talking about a ”humanitarian disaster” (a ”human-friendly”, ”philantropic” disaster? Really?). Then again’ the word ”disaster” itself apparenly used to denote the astrological influence of a ”bad star”, so should we get annoyed at people talking about the Covid-19 pandemic as a disaster for misusing the word and ignoring it’s astrological implications?
Assuming that iknklast is suppose to evoke “iconoclast”, then no, because the iconoclastic movement in mediaeval Constantinople was a movement to destroy icons. The Christians of that time and place were just as hostile to things like that as today’s Taliban.
We saw a film the other day about Jane Birkin (a British actress far better known in France than she is is the UK, and I wouldn’t be surprised to be told that she’s not known at all in the USA) described as an icon of the cinema.
Men who saw Antonioni’s Blow Up in the 1960s may remember Jane Birkin as the first adult woman in her birthday suit they ever saw from the front, but they may not have taken note of her name.
To think that this website has a thread like this AND a regular contributor whose moniker is iknklast; well if that does not make B and W iknic, nothing will.
I’ve always thought the street layout of San Francisco is the craziest I’ve ever come across, very well illustrated by California Street. I’ve wondered if the street planners drew the nice Cartesian layout on a sheet of paper without any knowledge of the geography.
Bruce @6 I agree, but I love the word for it’s meaning ‘in the process of decay.’ Decadent chocolate doesn’t sound good to me, it sounds chalky and decomposed. Funnily enough that reminds me of a steak house I visited that served ‘aged’ filet mignon. That’s right, it was rotten and covered in mold, certainly decadent by my definition. Mold should be reserved for cheese anyway. ;)
Steven @ 5 – yes, I remembered about computer icons after I posted; that does help explain it I think.
I guess I can accept the “object or building etc that strongly suggests a particular place” as one meaning. Maybe we could get “postcard” accepted instead. Anyway I agree there are such things – the Golden Gate Bridge, the Space Needle, the Chrysler building, the House of Commons seen from Westminster Bridge, the Eiffel Tower, a gondola, the Hollywood sign.
What’s hilarious about a new high-rise apartment building in Seattle calling itself that is that I can’t begin to express how generic such a thing is here now. 20 years ago that might have made sense but now they fill the landscape from edge to edge.
There’s “reminiscent of” but that doesn’t have the unique association associations.
And nor is the venerable British newspaper The Daily (or Sunday) Telegraph a tabloid. Along with the FT and the Sunday Times, it’s one of the small handful of broadsheets we still have. It may be greatly diminished in many ways these days, but its size is not one of them.
I’d have gone with Usually filled with San Francisco’s famed cable cars, California Sreet is here seen mostly empty on March 17, 2020.
At least they weren’t described as ‘legendary’, another word that has lost all meaning and is now used for anything and anybody managing to be slightly better than mediocre.
I’ve been living here in the PNW long enough now to consider myself a serious resident, and I cannot think of a single building outside of the Space Needle or maybe King Station to be representative of Seattle. An apartment building? Was that writer frickin’ joking?!
@12, dude, I know. I was trying (weakly) to be funny. Apparently I succeeded in the weakly part.
There’s the Pike Place Market – that probably qualifies too. But one of many many many tall glass apartment towers? Nope nope nope nope nope.
There’s a German word I can’t remember right now that people sometimes use even though there there is a perfectly appropriate English one. “USE YOUR OWN LANGUAGE!” I think, every time. And no, it’s not “Schadenfreude” which people seem to use correctly despite translating it shoddily.
What’s wrong with ‘evocative’?
Ah yes, that’s the word I was trying to think of. Brain let me down again.