THE TIME has surely come for all self-respecting newspapers, like this one, to consider a ban on the word “iconic”. At the very least we need a quota system that would limit its appearances in print. Because not only is it the most overused adjective of our age, but the extent to which it has strayed from the original meaning – on which it still depends for all legitimacy – is plain ridiculous.
In the past week alone, I have seen or heard it applied to the Kerry footballer Colm Cooper, to the fences of the English Grand National, to a recipe for chicken, and to those Belgian animated dwarfs who feature in a new film, The Smurfs.
Not long ago, I also saw one of the Sunday papers use it to describe a well-known Dublin hairdresser. And as good a coiffeur as the man might be, it seemed to me that his work could hardly be described as “iconic” unless, along with highlights and hair-extensions, he was also supplying customers with gold-leaf haloes.
All of which said, I was if anything more put out by an example in our own pages earlier this week, even though it was much closer to the original sense than normal. The reference was to the “iconic stained glass windows in Bewley’s of Grafton Street”.
And okay, the windows in question are by Harry Clarke. Who did indeed create iconic windows, in the original sense that they depicted religious figures and are situated in churches.
But the point is, he didn't create those kinds of windows for Bewley's. On the contrary, the ones he made for the restaurant's ground-floor cafe are deliberately secular, instead featuring such things as flowers and butterflies and exotic birds and sea creatures. So whatever about Colm Cooper or The Smurfs, the Bewley's windows should be the very last things to be described as iconic, if only to avoid confusion.
It would be more accurate – in one case at least – to call them “Ionic”. This is because their unifying theme is classical architecture. Thus, the central motif in each window is a column in one of the famous Greek styles: Ionic, Doric, Corinthian, and a composite form.
In fact, if you’re sitting in Bewley’s some day and have nothing better to do, it can be an amusing game to draw your neighbours’ attention to “Harry Clarke’s Ionic stained-glass window”. Then sit back smugly and wait for them to correct you before flooring them with your knowledge of Greek architecture. It’s the third window from the left, by the way: I wouldn’t want you making a fool of yourself by getting it wrong.
(While we’re on the subject – confused readers sometimes ask me what style of column this is. I tell them it’s predominantly Doric, with Corinthian elements. But being very old, the structure is delicate and requires constant maintenance. Hence the unsightly scaffolding that frequently obscures its beauty.)
I SUSPECT20th-century Russian Communists are to blame for the plethora of misplaced icons in the modern world, just as James Joyce is implicated in the mass redundancy of apostrophes that continues to be such a problem.
All those commas, inverted and otherwise, that Joyce threw on the scrap-heap in the 1920s have ever since been making a nuisance of themselves in a fruitless search for meaning. They or their unloved offspring now form a lumpen underclass of punctuation, unable to find gainful employment except in grocery stores, or occasionally doing part-time work for the class of journalist who doesn’t know how to spell the possessive form of “its”.
And perhaps something similar happened with Russian icons. In their war on organised religion, the communists destroyed millions of the pictures, using them as target practice and the like. But maybe they didn’t destroy them completely. Maybe, being spiritual representations, the pictures had souls that, freed from their temporal frames, have since been wandering the earth.
Unlike redundant apostrophes, some of the old icons may at least been able to get legitimate employment in the computer industry, representing those otherwise ineffable objects that lurk behind the screen. But there must be many others that couldn’t retrain and are still seeking more traditional work, attaching themselves to Kerry footballers and Dublin hairdressers, and anyone else who seems even slightly saint-like.
Of course the communists were not the first to destroy religious images. The history of iconoclasm is nearly as old as the history of religion itself and the earliest iconoclasts were themselves believers. In the service of God – as he saw it – the 8th-century Byzantine emperor, Leo III was as ardent as any Stalinist in his zeal for icon-breaking.
When he died, the work was carried on by his son, Constantine V, even though it made him so unpopular with other Christians that iconophiles gave him the Latin nickname “Copronymus”, meaning (in a loose translation) “Dung-head”. Eventually, however, iconoclasm waned and the picture lovers triumphed, although there are renewed outbreaks of the conflict periodically.
Perhaps another outbreak is now due. In our unprecedentedly secular world, the tendency to describe everything and anything as iconic must arise from some deep-seated human longing for aggrandisement, formerly the preserve of religion. In any case, it has gone too far. We need a new campaign, more in the spirit of Leo III than the communists. So pending a formal media ban, I urge all believers in English to act now and, if you see the word “iconic” anywhere today, smash it.