Iconic Cheeseburger

Discount language and the fight for intelligent life

My workday routine starts at 7am.  Coffee comes from two level scoops of grounds (sometimes more mountainous ones if I’m in the mood), brewed in my old Zojirushi machine purchased at the now vanished J&R Music World on Park Row in Manhattan.  That first cup brings out trains of thoughts, often in multiple streams. As I sit down I am faced with an imperfect world.  The shouting, the posturing, the posing, the media, the influencing, the conforming, the manipulating, and the complaining all line up to receive me on my tablet and my computer – even on my little radio telephone hand computer.  I tune in because it is out there, and I feel need to connect to something, but I sometimes wonder why I feel like the sole observer.  This morning I thought back to an old tape and how I could relate it to something in my current thoughts.

Many years ago, still in my teens, I was preparing to leave the country for an exchange program in Europe – certainly a most exciting event.  Considering that I would be away for the summer, I looked around the elements of my life for souvenirs to bring along.  I had a small reporter’s cassette recorder that my mother had lent me, and I thought to record some familiar television audio - something familiar like the Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.  I happened to record most of a segment (having missed the introduction) with an eccentric guest, an author Johnny addressed as “Mr. Mitchell”.  This would have been one of those last half hour guests – frequently writers who were booked to round out the nightly ninety-minute show.

This Mr. Mitchell was prattling on in a very expressive voice about language and how it related to precision or the lack thereof which in his opinion had resulted in accidents like the recent Three Mile Island radiation leak or the loss of a DC10 engine on American Airlines Flight 191 where everyone died.  He likened it, shockingly, to a disregarding of language and spelling.  To the audience’s apparent amusement he singled out the National Council of Teachers of English as the party to blame.  Johnny seemed to be a captive audience, but Mitchell was received as an enlightened clown.  Even so, there was a sense of truth being revealed – that not caring about spelling (and other subjects) had led to not caring about habits of precision (of standards) in general.  Who can forget his comment “English teachers lie behind that.”?

Mr. Mitchell, I found out much later, was English professor and New York Times contributor Richard Mitchell (who died in 2002) – author of a well-received book, among others, entitled The Leaning Tower of Babel (and other affronts from the UNDERGROUND GRAMMARIAN).  Over the years, Mitchell’s Tonight Show diatribe began to appear less funny and more prophetic.  He was looking after a certain level of consciousness and awareness of meanings and details.

The age of the Internet (from about 1996 on) has proved that true thoughtfulness and habits of precision have been increasingly put aside for profitability, ratings, and clicks.  A certain increasing trend has emerged that would have driven Richard Mitchell (who died in 2002) crazy.  Language has been, through this method, under assault through subtle means.

Marketing found the Internet and became social media.  Even the term “social media” seemed like two floating bodies happening to meet in cyberspace.  This was no concept of simply chatting on-line, which had existed for years, but was now transmogrified into communicating while on an imagined stage attended by peers and near-peers, sponsored by advertisers.  Because of the pressures of sociability and the need to dumb everything down, imitating and repeating became steadily more intense.  Everyone wanted to have “news” of their own to share – whether from selfies (arm’s length self-photographs made possible by wide angle lenses on mobile phones) or via news from other sources.  To aid this process, the English language adapted itself to short codes – words and phrases that sufficed for broader and broader use. 

Companies now want to tell you how to “grow your business” – kind of a joke originally, like raising house plants.  Now it’s practically the standard phrase for the idea of increasing of one’s profits.  Everything is “impacted”, even though impact isn’t traditionally a verb-transitive, unless you’re a dentist or an engineer.  Somehow, people like the way it sounds.  Hardly anyone uses the more apt “affected” in its place, which I find slightly jarring.  It’s really a further example of casual wear now meeting language.  Elegance and regality are more and more taking the back seat.

The example of this shift that started grabbing my attention (and frequent ire) was the near-constant use of the word “iconic”.  It burst out from the Internet in the late 90’s and into the verbiage of reporters, journalists, and advertisers – unquestioned in its blanket use for everything other than its original definition.  I took out my 80’s edition Webster’s Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary and looked up “icon”.  Here’s what the book said:

“A usually pictorial representation or a conventional religious image typically painted on a small wooden panel and used in the devotions of Eastern Christians.”  There was also “an object of uncritical devotion”.  Finally, it offered the word as “an emblem or symbol” (a representation of a broader subject).  The late great World Trade Towers were iconic, in that they represented American industry, wealth, and focus, much as the Empire State Building had represented the city and country’s power and status to the entire world.  Cleverly, Xerox had placed “icons” (small pictographs representing files) on its 1973 Alto computer screen.  This was a literal adaptation (and also a humorous variation) of the traditional meaning of the word.  Since then, even cheeseburgers and ballpoint pens have become iconic.

The missing words are all the synonyms like famous, celebrated, well-known, representative, emblematic, recognizable, distinctive, and familiar.  Instead of bothering with thesauruses and dictionaries, it’s so much easier to keep on using “iconic”, because everyone will sort of know what you mean.  Just the same, the language itself becomes just that much less colorful and interesting.  The frightening thing to me about this is the unexamined status of expression.  Ask anyone who uses ‘iconic’ in a sentence to offer a few synonyms, and they may be stumped.  Yet at the same time it’s still uttered as something original and profound.

Marketers encourage an acceptance of thoughts and claims without skepticism.  This includes cheapening and simplifying the language for the sake of profitability and ease in a kind of grim standardization.  Reversing the topic a bit, imagine going out to buy Iconic Amos Cookies or vising the Hollywood Walk of Iconicity.  It’s just not the same.  There is magic in certain words.

This leads to a broader topic of one’s inner life and imagination, which I believe is seen as an enemy of advertising, even though imagination is required at the top of it.  At the level of consumers it is to be discouraged.  The clichés roll on.  Perhaps that’s just part of the comfort of our times, but it can also lead to some of the hysteria seen on worldwide college campuses within the last several years.  For me, it hearkens back to George Orwell’s Animal Farm in which the sheep on Mr. Jones’ farm are bleating “four legs good, two legs bad!” without any further examination.

As Richard Mitchell was trying to relay to the free audience at NBC Burbank and to a bleary-eyed audience at home, small mistakes actually do matter.  Being conscious is harder but important.  Learning how to do things well is good for you, good for me, and good for everyone.  It gives us some hope that the next chapter might actually be better.