Our amazing passion for iconic words has absolutely no linguistic validity

IT HAS its competitors, but the single most overused word in the lexicon at the moment is “passion”.

It is used to describe everything from enjoying barbecues to having a DIY habit or a liking for blue Smarties.

For several months, driving home from the office, I travelled beneath a bridge which had two dirty eyes on it. The eyes had mascara running in all directions.

The owner, one presumed, was female — no offence to the lads who like to extend and swell their eyelashes. At first glance, it looked as if it was one of those relationship-enhancement advertisements that warn women that the first time your partner hits you isn’t going to be the last.

It was only when the traffic congestion halted cars, affording their drivers a longer look at the thing, that the word passion announced itself underneath the dirty eyes and it became clear it was an ad for booze.

The message was difficult to interpret. It could have meant that women with a passion for this particular drink would imbibe until their mascara ran, although, give the drink makers their illogical due, they had included that ridiculous counter argument about drinking the product sensibly as well. Weird.

In the past week, I’ve heard people describing themselves as having a passion for a) handbags, b) Maltesers, c) gardening, d) Spanx, e) shoes f) cats, g) gossip, h) Greece, i) men with hairy backs to their hands, j) brown bread ice cream, k) iPhones, l) the smell of petrol, j) seaweed baths and k) spinach.

What they mean is that they have a preference for these items, places or products.

Even a preference is hard to accept, in relation to some of them. You have to wonder, for example, about the commonsense of anybody who likes Spanx, the elastic underwear which takes a year and a half to get into, interferes with almost all natural processes (like blood circulation and breathing) and does nothing for the appearance other than pushing the fat that belongs around the stomach up under the armpits, so the wearer takes on the general shape of an ice-cream cone.

Liking the smell of petrol, on the other hand, is understandable. Whenever I fill the tank and read the RSA’s advice about not driving when tired, I position myself to get the full blast of the fumes coming from the tank. No doubt some state-sponsored body (other than the RSA) will now send a letter to this newspaper suggesting that this is substance abuse. If it is, I’ll stop. I kicked the Tipp-Ex habit when someone pointed out that a white blob on the end of the nose might start a rumour about me.

‘Passion’, like ‘Icon’, has lost the run of itself. At this point, anybody who’s been halfway famous for more than a week gets described as an icon. Someone whose name is unfamiliar and unpronounceable gets solemnly described as “the icon of bathroom design”. Until recently, you’d often hear developers talking about creating “iconic buildings”. What they meant was structures that were big and noticeable.

Mercifully, you hear less of that stuff since the credit crunch. Even the iconic U2 Tower has question marks around it.

I’ll concede that U2 themselves may be an iconic band. It is legitimate to describe Bono as an iconic figure. But using the word with such relentless regularity sucks the meaning out of it, like chewing gum that’s been munched for too long. Does your chewing gum lose its flavour on the bedpost overnight? Sure it does, just as the word Icon, which is supposed to connote someone or something emblematic of an era, a trend or a genre, loses its meaning when stuck, overnight, on bedposts like Sex and the City.

THE full magnificence of the concept of the icon is seen in the legend of Constantine, who, it is said saw the Chi Ro icon, made up of the first letters of the Greek word for Christ, across the setting sun on the night before a pivotal battle. When he slept that night, he dreamed that if the icon were to be stencilled across the shields of his warriors, there’d be no stopping them on the following day. Apprehending the importance of a good logo, Constantine had the symbol put on all shields at dawn and won the battle, hands-down.

In pleasing contrast, when the Irish monks illuminating the Book of Kells came to the Chi Ro page, they eschewed grandiosity, drawing a little cat and mouse under the table of the Last Supper, companionably sharing the crumbs fallen from the table. That’s the great thing about a genuine icon — it is so definitive, so quintessential, that it requires none of the frantic adjectival support we give to the transiently famous individuals and brands which currently have iconic status attributed to them.

Another word grievously overused and misused is “amazing”. One morning recently, I heard someone describe the tie worn by the man in my life as “amazing”.

I surveyed him, expecting something as surprising as the one Professor Drumm of the HSE wore to an early press conference, which was widely — and wrongly — interpreted as sending a hostile message to his political boss, since it consisted of a Looney Tunes cartoon in raucous colour. In fact, the head of the HSE, as a paediatrician, had got into the habit of wearing cartoon ties because they distracted and pleased the sick children with whom he had to deal, and wearing it at a public event emerged from habit, rather than malice.

When he was told he was wearing an amazing tie, the man in my life got a bit bothered. He surveyed it from above. Saw nothing amazing about it. Lifted up the end and turned it around to see what he was missing. Still nothing amazing. Turned it inside out to see if it had been designed by someone like Jerry Garcia. It hadn’t.

It took a quick tutorial for him to understand that the observer merely thought the tie reasonably pleasing. Amazing was just the handiest term of approbation. Handy — and wrong.

It’s genuinely amazing that a headbanger from Switzerland could invent a balloon on a tube and persuade the medical profession, world-wide that threading this balloon up from someone’s groin to their hearts and then inflating it would flatten the gunge blocking an artery and thereby obviate transplant or bypass cardiac surgery.

It’s amazing that a house worth a million last year can’t find a buyer this year. And if you want to see real amazement, it was visible on beaches all around Ireland over the weekend, when toddlers for the first time encountered the wonder of warm sea water, the construction possibilities of sand and the infinite excitement of briefly owning a bucketful of pinkeens. That’s true amazement.

Of course, if you have a passion for finding out the iconic word of the decade, the one that appears with amazing regularity in every second radio interview, the one that qualifies is “absolutely”.

Whatever happened that neat little word “yes”?