ICONS

The constituent parts of the title of this book, Icons of the Middle Ages: Rulers, Writers, Rebels, and Saints, bear some explication and close reading. In its use here, “icons” is a very new term indeed and reflects the modern age, its psyche, and its fascination with celebrity. Consider some recent instances of “icon” in the press: “Then there is [Barry] Bonds, 46, never a media darling and hardly a sympathetic figure, but a looming icon in this city” (New York Times, March 21, 2011);1 “An icon of old and new Hollywood, she [Elizabeth Taylor] defined modern celebrity—and America couldn’t take its eyes off her” (sub-headline, USA Today, March 24, 2011, 1A); “PopEater’s Rob Shuter recently reported that Lindsay Lohan wants to drop the ‘Lo’ in ‘LiLo’ and transform into a new pop icon known simply as Lindsay” (online post at PopEater. com);2 “A great track. . . leads out onto an astonishing landscape, one that over the years has, deservedly, achieved iconic status” (Scotland Magazine 54, Paragraph Publishing Ltd., March 2011).

These excerpts represent very new senses of the noun icon, covered by what the Oxford English Dictionary Online defined in a draft addition of March 2001 as: “A person or thing regarded as a representative symbol, esp. of a culture or movement; a person, institution, etc., considered worthy of admiration or respect. Freq. with modifying word.”3 The first quotation for this sense in the OED is from a magazine article of spring 1952 (“a national icon. . . the American Mr. Moneybags”), followed by five further illustrative quotes, all from newspapers or magazines (1975: “institutional icons such as the ICC and CAB”; 1980: “Defining his icons as cultural phenomena, Wolfe [etc.]”; 1988: “an icon for young Indian intellectuals, the 32-year-old Ramanujan”; 1995: “An American icon, the pickup truck”; 2000: “Hollywood’s female gay icons Jodie Foster, Susan Sarandon and Jamie Lee Curtis.” This sense of the noun is paralleled in the adjective iconic, first quoted from Newsweek in 1976, with three later magazine and newspaper instances.

The quotations in the OED are positive in connotation, but it is clear from the recent citations given above that the sense is expanding: Barry Bonds and Lindsay Lohan are difficult to be “considered worthy of admiration or respect.” Wikipedia tries hard to distinguish all sorts of sub-varieties of the modern celebrity sense of icon: “pop icon” is distinguished from “cult icon,” and has its own entry, as do “cultural icon,” “secular icon,” and “gay icon,” while “political icon” cannot be far behind. And we haven’t even touched on the second widespread, new, late twentieth-century sense in computing: “A small symbolic picture of a physical object on a computer screen, esp. one that represents a particular option and can be selected to exercise that option” (see OED Online)! The earliest, original senses of icon—“an image; a portrait; an illustration in a book,” “a solid image; a statue,” “a simile”—have become obsolete. A philosophical sense of “a sign that represents its object by sharing some common character” is surely restricted at best. Apart from its recently acquired senses, only the sense of “a representation of a sacred personage” in the context of the Greek or Russian Orthodox Church has survived in common parlance.

The lesson is that icon and iconic have indeed become overused terms, often used indiscriminately and gushingly to denote “a famous (or, by extension, an infamous or even a notorious) person or thing.” The expansion in meaning and use are largely driven by the advertising and entertainment industries through print media and the Internet. But such is the development of language, reflecting societal changes and tastes; the icon, so to speak, once out of the bottle will never be put back in again.4