Lawrence Hall
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.
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