When Google Glass introduced prescription frames to go along with its famously weird-looking wearable tech yesterday, lead Glass designer Isabelle Olsson threw down a particularly loaded characterization of the product’s latest update. In explaining how her team approached the design process, she said “We… infused our sense of minimalism and lightness–which is part of our DNA–and simplified them into these iconic styles.”
Sorry, what? A brand-new product that’s iconic? It’s a common bit of parlance in the design world, among designers and marketers who naturally aspire to a certain timeless panache (arts journalists toss it around plenty, too). A word once reserved for symbols or religious images, an icon can now be pretty much anything easily recognizable. Or anything deemed a little bit exciting, if you start to read enough press releases. But the more we call every creation “iconic,” the less impact the word has. If every new tech product is an icon, how do we describe something that truly changed the tech world, like the iPod? If every new tall structure is an iconic piece of architecture, what do we call the instantly identifiable silhouette of the Eiffel Tower?
Look how the usage of the word has shot up in books over time, as demonstrated by Google Ngram Viewer:
The noun “icon” has seen an even greater increase, though its usage has also dipped since 2000:
“I mean the numbers are small–they show that icon and iconic are not everyday words,” says Anne Curzan, a professor of English and linguistics at the University of Michigan. “But to get that kind of rise–particularly with icon–is striking.”
The Corpus of Contemporary English, another database, shows that iconic is most frequently used in magazine writing, compared to its use in newspapers, scholarly writing, fiction or spoken language. Since 2001, its usage has increased more than fourfold.
Here are just a few of the things we’ve seen described as “iconic” recently:
