Call from an icon

Steve Hemmingsen explains why he hates the fact that everything is becoming an 'icon' or 'iconic', from Keloland:

I was going to save this one for my New Years Resolution column, but I just can’t sit on it that long. I was going to suggest that we drop the words “icon” and “iconic” from the English language as of December 31, 2008. It was to be a resolution for everybody else since I don’t recall ever using that iconic duo.

While I don’t use it, I find myself bombarded with it hourly, sometimes twice hourly, sometimes in minutes, like an ion storm of icons. Everybody who has ever made the headlines is now an icon, like anybody who catches a bullet in a drive by shooting or survives an accident is a hero. They ain’t, necessarily, but we slap the label on them anyway.

An icon used to be religious image, although its Greek roots suggest it is being abused correctly. Later, somehow, all those little things on which you click on your computer screen became icons. Here is a loose diary I’ve been keeping of this icon bombardment as launched by the likes of Katy Couric and Charles Osgood and other iconic media types. Ooops! See what I mean? It’s like a childhood disease, before we started worrying about them.

I heard a reporter describe the terrorist rampage in Mumbai* as a terrorist attack on “iconic” hotels. Just after CBS Sunday Morning gave me a couple of icon blasts, the once-iconic Minneapolis Trib referred to Polaroid and its sagging fortunes as an “iconic American company.”

The trib also captioned a picture of one of those British red phone booths on the island of Malta as an “Icon of the Malta landscape.” Gimme a quarter. I gotta make a call from an icon...