Number 84
Ellen writes: The "little pictures on my computer desktop are called icons. Not one has anything close to a religious meaning." And she sent the dictionary definitions as follows, with the subject line, "This does NOT help!"
(1) a. An image; a representation. b. A representation or picture of a sacred or sanctified Christian personage, traditionally used and venerated in the Eastern Church. (2) An important and enduring symbol: "Voyager will take its place . . . alongside such icons of airborne adventure as The Spirit of St. Louis and [the] Bell X-1" (William D. Marbach). (3) One who is the object of great attention and devotion; an idol: "He is ... a pop icon designed and manufactured for the video generation" (Harry F. Waters). (4) Computer Science: A picture on a screen that represents a specific file, directory, window, option, or program.
In the Russian and Greek Orthodox churches, icons have traditionally been images of venerated holy figures painted on wood. The art does not use perspective, and gold paint (in haloes, etc.) represents the timeless present, or eternity. As so often happens, this specific physical definition has evolved to take on more abstract duties.
Further, YourDictonary.com has this word history for "iconoclast," one who destroys icons:
An iconoclast can be unpleasant company, but at least the modern iconoclast only attacks such things as ideas and institutions. The original iconoclasts destroyed countless works of art. Eikonoklasts, the ancestor of our word, was first formed in Medieval Greek from the elements eikn, "image, likeness," and -klasts, "breaker," from kln, "to break." The images referred to by the word are religious images, which were the subject of controversy among Christians of the Byzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries, when iconoclasm was at its height. In addition to destroying many sculptures and paintings, those opposed to images attempted to have them barred from display and veneration. During the Protestant Reformation images in churches were again felt to be idolatrous and were once more banned and destroyed. It is around this time that iconoclast, the descendant of the Greek word, is first recorded in English (1641), with reference to the Byzantine iconoclasts. In the 19th century iconoclast took on the secular sense that it has today, as in "Kant was the great iconoclast" (James Martineau).
The Wikipedia explains iconoclasm further:
By venerating icons, Orthodox Christians acknowledge that matter is not inherently evil, but can be used by God. Saint John of Damascus observed that the iconoclasts, who attacked the use of icons, often found themselves denying the goodness of matter (part of the heresy of Gnosticism), to the point of doubting the real incarnation of Jesus Christ as fully human (the heresy of Docetism), or that he was resurrected with a real physical body.
While Christians allow the use of religious imagery to a greater or lesser degree, Jews and Muslims do not. In fact, Muslims don't allow the use of any human image in art at all, and you may remember that in 2000, the Taliban destroyed ancient Buddhist art in Afhanistan:
In the spring of 2000, Afghanistan's Taliban (Islamic extremists in power) destroyed colossal statues of the Buddha, carved from a living rock cliff at Bamiyan, 145 km west of Kabul, Afghanistan, long before the arrival of Islam in that area. One of the statues was 53 metres high and dated to the 5th century CE; the other was 37 metres tall and dated to the 3rd century. These were rare examples of statuary in the Greco-Buddhist style, priceless ancient relics of this important cultural crossroads. Several thousand monks once lived in the caves next to the statue. The Taliban's supreme leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, ordered the destruction in an edict, saying such images were contrary to Islam. "These idols have been gods of the infidels, who worshipped them, and these are respected even now and perhaps maybe turned into gods again," his edict said.
The word "iconoclast" is often used with admiration to refer to people who see through sham and bravely state unorthodox opinions, but at one extreme, iconoclasm is like Nazi book burning, which we need hardly be reminded isn't far off from human burning. It's one thing to abjure the making of images, and quite another to destroy someone else's sacred images. Even if you despise another's religion, it seems that the automatic human response to ancient ~ and huge ~ art is awe.
"Icon" has acquired a secular meaning too, but it suggests more than mere fame or celebrity. So you see my point in PO 83 about the use of "Democratic icons." Elvis Presley is an iconic American figure, and in fact there are people who venerate him as a religious figure ~ really. I can't think of any politicians, even former presidents, who have attained that status.
How did "icons" get to be the little pictures you click on your computer screen? I collected the following from various Web sites.
David Canfield Smith coined the term "icons" in his 1975 Stanford PhD thesis, "Pygmalion: A Creative Programming Environment" (funded by ARPA and NIMH), and later popularized icons as one of the chief designers of Xerox Star. According to Smith, he adopted the term from the Russian Orthodox Church where an icon is more than an image because it embodies properties of what it represents [emphasis added].
The religious icon was not an idol, but it was a sacred object, used for prayer; it wasn't just paint and wood. A human icon represents more than just his or her own body and biography. An iconic figure signifies some emotional or intellectual meaning in the culture. And of course your computer icons take you on a little computer trip.
By the way, I also learned that old DOS mavens (Yiddish for geeks) invented the term WIMP for the windows, icons, mice, and pointers GUI (graphical user interface) environment. If you remember the old DOS environment, you'll know why the old DOS computer geeks thought the new ~ vastly simpler ~ environment, which emulated Apple, was wimpy. As I recall, they didn't like to (or couldn't, if you remember the early manuals) explain DOS very well to newbies. But the windows and icons and so on made it easy, and possible, for the computer to become part of everyday work life and home communications.
Going further back in our technological lifetimes, there used to be highly skilled secretaries (clerical geeks) who rather resented the ease of correcting typing mistakes with the new word processors. They could type a 10-page letter with 5 carbons with no mistakes, but now, so what? I remember the secretary to a university president who would return to sender a letter from campus, not just if it had a mistake, but if it had a visible correction. If she were still alive, she'd still have scope for her powers, though, since even spell-checkers don't guarantee perfection.
A Polish friend tells me that "Krystyna" is the Polish spelling of Christina. However, I know that not all Americans who change C's to K's and I's to Y's in naming their babies or themselves are Polish or have any ideas about Polish spelling.
Thanks to readers for referring me to two books on cryptology, The Code Breakers by David Kahn, 1967, and Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson, 1999. They both look fascinating, and they're each about one cubic foot apiece. I haven't weighed them yet.
Dave Da Bee pointed out my fuzzy antecedent in the last PO: "I wrote a sci fi / crime book about this very subject." The subject is human cloning. No bearing on the Truss book, which I still haven't read.
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