Thursday, October 1, 2020

Ceilings Breaking Glass Icons

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

 

Ceilings Breaking Glass Icons

 

Newsies, both in print and on the telescreens, seem unable to refer to anyone who has died as other than an icon. As a metaphor, this never worked well anyway, as an icon is a two-dimension painting or drawing – the Orthodox term is “written” – of a religious figure for inspiration.  Obviously a human being, alive or dead, cannot be an icon in any meaningful sense, although he or she might someday appear on an icon after ecclesiastical investigation, documentation, and recognition a life of recognized saintliness.  But since the metaphor has been spun out daily for years, possibly decades, it is time to let it go.

 

“Icon” has long since joined “give you the shirt off his back,” “never met a stranger,” “his word was his bond,” “they broke the mold when they made him,” and other funerary imagery as filler-language that says nothing. If we mean to praise someone, let us do so in good, plain, declarative sentences, and forego all the babble that everyone trots out for everyone else.

 

In the run-up to All Souls and All Saints, secularized as “Halloween” with its purportedly pagan Celtic origins, “Spooktacular” infests advertisements as a variation of “spectacular.” Every advertisement and every fund-raiser is gas-filled by dull and lazy writers as “spooktacular.” Please, don’t. Just don’t.

 

Another contemporary failure in speaking and writing is the excessive use of adjectives and adverbs. Or to put it in another way, “Another absolutely contemporary failure, actually, in actually speaking and actually writing, actually, is the unnecessary excessive and repetitive and pointless use of so many overwhelmingly redundant adjectives and really and truly excessive adverbs, actually.”

 

The best way to say something is to do so without any adjectives and adverbs, in the plainest way possible, and so clearly that it cannot be taken as meaning anything other than what the speaker intended.

 

And while your ‘umble scrivener is being grumpy, let’s also get rid of that “he must have had a pre-existing condition” thing as a weak deflection when discussing the CV. We all have pre-existing conditions; no one is perfect physically. Some people say “pre-existing condition” as if 200,000+ of our fellow pilgrims here on earth deserved to die. If a child is eaten by an alligator someone will defend the alligator’s violence with, “well, the kid had a pre-existing condition,” and of course “the alligators were here first.”

 

Use the brain God gave you. Wear your mask. Keep your distance. Act right. Wash. This is real.

 

-30-

 

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