"icon" and "iconic"

[Jonathan Lighter]

It used to be that to see an icon you'd have to open an art book. Now you
turn on the 'puter and they're everywhere. Icons are in the planetary
consciousness.

"Iconic" is punchy, understandable, and easy to remember. It naturally tends
to displace longer, less hip phrases like "instantly recognizable,"
"celebrated," "universally familiar," "famous," "typical," etc.  Same for
"icon."

I'm tired of hearing them too, but the world won't listen to me!  Bad world!

JL


.On Thu, Mar 24, 2011 at 7:39 AM, Jocelyn Limpert <jocelyn.limpert at gmail.com
> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jocelyn Limpert <jocelyn.limpert at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      "icon" and "iconic"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Must the whole writing and speaking world keep using "icon" and "iconic"?
> What once were acceptable have been so overused and should be used
> sparingly, if at all, because of this -- don't people have other words in
> their, "like," so "awesome" vocabularies these days? People latch on to
> these words and so overuse them and just don't let go. That's one of the
> joys of being an editor, fixing such writing or speech, if you can get your
> hands on it -- in the same way, someone I know has to remove every numerous
> and unnecessary and meaningless "kind of" and "sort of" from interview
> responses.
>
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