Friday, February 12, 2016

Warning: Contains Bad Language

There have been complaints.

Swearing in my blog.

Tough shit.

This one contains worse use of language.

Such as "iconic".

Do the users of this word, the journalists and broadcasters who spread it around like explosive cow shit in an unfenced waterway, guaranteed to make a high country hiker go hyper on Instagram, even know what it means?

iconic (The Concise Oxford Dictionary)  adj. 1 of or having the nature of an image or portrait. 2 (of a statue) following a conventional type. 3 Linguistics that is an icon.

This overused adjective is applied to describe everything from a Member of Parliament to some random dairy south of Timaru called Kia Ora tagged by vandals.

Please, can we have a moratorium on iconic?

moratorium n. (often foll. by on) a temporary prohibition or suspension (of an activity)

Other obscene language which is painful to the ears - "quite unique".

I am shopping for cosmetics and the otherwise very beautiful young thing compliments me on my cardigan (which is rather special) and then says, "It's quite unique".

Oh fuck please kill me now.

No. It is not quite unique. It is mass produced. If it was unique it might have been on the body of Diane Foreman. Or Posh Spice. But not me.

"Quite unique" is an oxymoron.

oxymoron n.  Rhet. a figure of speech in which apparently contradictory terms appear in conjunction (e.g. faith unfaithful kept him falsely true).

There is no connection between an oxymoron, and a moron who thinks cattle should die of thirst rather than briefly be allowed to drink from a river in the high heat of summer.

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