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Miscellaneous See other Miscellaneous Articles Title: Isn't it iconic? The words we use are influenced by fads and fancies A search of The Sun's electronic library reveals usage climbs and declines In 1985, the word "iconic" did not appear in The Vancouver Sun. Not once. This year it has popped up more than 528 times. Everything we admire (or revile) is now iconic. In 2011 that meant woodland caribou, the Rolls-Royce hood ornament, Science World in Vancouver, the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman Albert Pujols, and numerous actors, wines, gardens and even at least one statue. The Avalon Dairy was merely "neariconic." A search engine that is part of this newspaper's electronic library has the useful feature of dividing articles by year, and it shows the steady climb of the word "iconic" to iconic status. Unused in the early 1990s, it has become more common almost every year since (though with a slight drop from 2010 to 2011). Don't blame newspapers alone. The word is used by politicians and people who write us letters, by barbers, by entertainers, by all kinds of people we interview, and we dutifully record it for posterity. And while our society adopts some words purely through fashion, others rise and fall according to economic times ("bailout") or political attitudes ("Kyoto Protocol"). The search engine - used by any newspaper, and probably many other users - records how words come and go, and sometimes return. It even graphs them. If anyone wants a definition of exponential increase, the graph on "iconic" is a pretty good sample. But so is "game changer." Now there's an upstart word for you. A search of the past 20 years in the archives shows we didn't change games much, if at all, for most of them. Then suddenly, in 2001, gamechanging moments started appearing in our pages, accelerating until 2010, when there were 34 of them. It's dipped since, appearing but 18 times in 2011. Next year, who knows? If you're putting money on a word (or phrase), bet high on this one. Obviously some words arrive through new technology. Nobody was using the word "Internet" in 1990 because the modern, public version didn't exist yet. But excluding these technological terms, there are fads in what words we choose to use. "Bailout" shot to prominence in 2008 and 2009, dropped sharply in 2010 when the world's economy was supposedly fixed, and jumped again in 2011 as Greece needed one. The graph of its use runs as an eerie mirror image of the stock market. And the Kyoto Protocol? Created in 1997, it appeared in print just once that year. It surged after that, peaking in 2002, when it appeared 177 times. But an odd thing happened: The multinational treaty actually took effect in 2008, and from that point on interest cooled, with fewer than 100 letters, columns and articles about it in that year and each year since. And that's despite heavy news coverage of international negotiations in Copenhagen and Durban. In 2011, when Canada formally pulled out of the treaty, it was cited 46 times in this newspaper. There's nothing new to these high and low tides in usage, says Paul Keen, who chairs the English department at Ottawa's Carleton University. Keen studies Samuel Johnson, who published a famous English dictionary in 1755. Keen once thought Johnson was a bit stuffy, until he read what the old gentleman said about changing language in the preface. "He's horrified by the way newfangled words are being used and the way old words are bastardized, but he's also more generous than people acknowledge. "He says part of him would like to embalm the language, to fix it and say, 'Here's the definition.' "But he says even back then [that] it doesn't happen. Changing social relations, commercial realities, political pressures, the kind of stuff that's in the daily news" all combine to make words come and go. Words also change meanings, he notes. An icon used to be a religious painting from Eastern Europe. "Now it's all 'iconic moments.' That seems to be the phrase," Keen says. The cause of shifting usage "is not a simple thing. It's a kind of stew of social needs and practices, [and] a political moment. But then there's this percolating effect. The media obviously has a huge part." He highlights "the way a word like 'deconstruction' changes. I hear sports announcers say, 'he deconstructed the defence.' And it means nothing like what Derrida meant at all." (Philosopher Jacques Derrida used the word in a book in 1967.) "But on the other hand, who cares? If it's circulating in useful ways and filling a useful role, then no one has a monopoly on that language." © Copyright (c) The Vancouver Sun Poster Comment: A cultural icon can be a symbol, logo, picture, name, face, person, building or other image that is readily recognized and generally represents an object or concept with great cultural significance to a wide cultural group. A representation of an object or person, or that object or person may come to be regarded as having a special status as particularly representative of, or important to, or loved by, a particular group of people, a place, or a period in history. In the media, many well-known manifestations of popular culture have been described as "iconic". Some writers say that the word is overused.[ Iconic Memory: Humans remember sounds and words in slightly different ways. Memory for visual stimuli is referred to as iconic memory, which can be defined as very brief sensory memory of some visual stimuli, that occur in the form of mental pictures. For example, if I ask you to look at a picture and then close your eyes and try to see the picture, what you can "see" in your mind's eye is an iconic memory of the image in the picture. Typically, iconic memories are stored for slightly shorter periods of time than echoic memories (auditory memories). Please be aware that both echoic and iconic memories are sensory memories, not types of long-term memory, and thus are very temporary and fade quickly. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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