Is iconic the new ironic?A recent Google search Google is owned by Google, Inc. whose mission statement is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful". The largest search engine on the web, Google receives several hundred million queries each day through its various services. for the word ironic yielded 24.1 million hits, and one for iconic yielded only 11 million. But I say iconic is rapidly becoming one of the top overused, overrated Overrated was a Horde World of Warcraft guild, based on the US Black Dragonflight Realm. On November 2 2006, the majority of the guild members were indefinitely banned from the game for use of (or directly benefiting from) a third-party "wall-hack", used to bypass content , and sometimes misused words in current usage. That's not good for careful writers and readers. I've always shivered reading the word and the use of ironic--not only because of its casual frequency but almost as often because of the misuse of its meaning. Whatever happened, for example, to coincidental, paradoxical, and surprising? Like that other beat-to-death word literal, ironic has frequently been downgraded to a general intensifier in·ten·si·fi·er n. Grammar See intensive. intensifier Noun a word, esp. an adjective or adverb, that intensifies the meaning of the word or phrase that it modifies, for example, very . For example, I literally died laughing. Ironically, she survived the accident. So I literally and half-ironically laughed when I read that one of The New York New York, state, United States New York, Middle Atlantic state of the United States. It is bordered by Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and the Atlantic Ocean (E), New Jersey and Pennsylvania (S), Lakes Erie and Ontario and the Canadian province of Times' indicators of our current culture was the frequency of the newspaper's own use of the words ironic and irony 2001-2006. The Times' ran an Op-Chart by Ben Schott, "Five Years of Consequence," upon the occasion of the fifth anniversary of 9/11. Other benchmarks for the period 2001-2006 included significant news events; George W. Bush's weight (up) and blood pressure (down); presidential approval ratings (up and then way down); winners of Nobel Prizes, Tonys, Oscars, Pulitzers; unemployment rates; the Dow Jones Industrial Average Dow Jones Industrial Average The best known U.S. index of stocks. A price-weighted average of 30 actively traded blue-chip stocks, primarily industrials including stocks that trade on the New York Stock Exchange. ; winners of all the major sports competitions. You get the idea. But in the middle of all those societal benchmarks lay Schott's tradectory of the paper's use of irony and ironic (it's higher now). I wonder if that's the newspaper's admission of its excessive use of the word or if it's a nod to our post-modern age of irony. Because the word has lost its meaning in so many instances, my question will go unanswered. Anyway, iconic is rapidly gaining on ironic. That's not good for careful writers and readers. In the mass media, I imagine some iconoclasts will soon be described as iconic. I live near the Taconic State Parkway The Taconic State Parkway is a part of the New York State highway system. For most of its route, the "Teaspoon" (TSP), as it is sometimes humorously referred to by "roadgeeks", is four lanes. , a scenic road built in the 1930s by the CCC CCC A very speculative grade assigned to a debt obligation by a rating agency. Such a rating indicates default or considerable doubt that interest will be paid or principal repaid. Also called Caa. that sweeps through a 100-mile wooded park from Westchester County to the Massachusetts border. At its southern entrance a sign says it's "The Flagship Parkway of America." What are the new marketing guys going to come up with? "The Iconic Taconic"? And don't tell me that would be ironic. * As we go to press, this footnote bumps a planned pull-quote. The day after I wrote the above sentence, I read the obituary for the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci described as an "iconoclastic i·con·o·clast n. 1. One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions. 2. One who destroys sacred religious images. journalist who became an icon herself"--in The New York Times. |
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