I like to have a few handsomely misused words going at all times that drive me a little nutty. It’s good, I believe, for my blood pressure, which is normally low, but which the American language and people, in their combined genius, often help to raise. For a while, what I thought of as “the flying ‘whatever'” was doing this job nicely. This is a “whatever” tossed in whatever a speaker can’t be bothered to complete a sentence or answer a question or supply an indirect object or round off a thought. Whatever.
An old standby for me has been the regular misuse of the word “issue.” The correct use of this word is the only worthwhile thing I learned from two years of working with the philosopher Mortimer J. Adler, who made a useful distinction among problems, questions, and issues. “A p-problem,” he would say, his racing, doubtless appallingly high-I.Q. mind causing him to stutter slightly, “calls for a solution. A qu-question requires an answer. And an issue is something in the flux of con-con-controversy.”
For the years I took a mild pleasure in listening to television johnnies and janes muddle the distinction, citing a problem as a question, an issue as a question, and everything but a pro-football score and the Dow Jones as an issue. When a man or woman has a salary ten or twenty times greater than your own, all that is left to you, it seems to me, is to hold him or her in contempt for his poor usage, and this I did, on all possible occasions, with a smugness that brought me fleeting but sincere happiness. “It’s not an issue at all,” I would call out to my television set, “it’s a question, you idiot.”
But, then, the word “issue” really jumped the tracks and flew completely out of control. The comedian Garry Shandling, quoted in the New Yorker, remarked, perhaps partly satirically (then again, perhaps not): “My friends tell me that I have an intimacy issue — but I don’t think they know me.” In THE WEEKLY STANDARD — I drape a small black flag over my heart as I report this — I one day read: “Issue-wise, each of these men [four philandering politicians] was always faithful.” Issue-wise? Hmm. What can that possibly mean? Whatever.
A student writes in a paper on Joseph Conrad’s character Verloc: “Because he has hitherto served adequately in his defined role as provider, he sees no reason to worry further about the issue.” I turn to the New York Times Book Review, where I find a reviewer describing the heroine of the novel under review: “In other words, Edith’s issue with boundaries parallels the problem of nations in a borderless age.” One has issues not only with things but with people, as in “I’ve got issues with her.” “Issue” thus leaves the domain of controversy and lovely flux, and becomes merely any disagreement or complaint, and in doing so departs its usefulness as a precise term. So long, “issue”; it was nice knowing you.
But what has happened to “issue” is nothing compared with the current beating that the word “icon” is taking. Beginning life as “a conventional religious image typically painted on a small wooden panel and used in the devotions of Eastern Christians,” “icon” now includes the likes of Madonna and Dennis Rodman. “Icon” is, in other words, the status those few out-landishly successful publicity figures achieve when “superstardom” (itself a wildly dubious term) seems no longer sufficient.
“Icon” has also become anything that anyone has at one time or another thought worthy of devotion or loyalty or that is even faintly admired. An actor on Ally McBeal writes a letter to the New York Times in which he calls Gypsy Rose Lee “the great feminist icon.” Tom Wolfe, it turns out, according to the same newspaper, has been artfully “dismantling cultural icons,” while Yoko Ono, by pushing more and more of her late husband’s recordings and books back on the market, has been responsible for the “packaging of an icon,” no doubt with the help of some evil speculator, a type that is “once again a powerful icon.”
A University of Chicago professor has written on how “the image of the black woman in the 19th century became a racist icon for deviant sexuality.” And then there is Walter Winchell, of whom TV Guide asks: “Icon or Hack?” Another academic has written The Last Dinosaur Book, in which, the Atlantic Monthly reports, “he considers the dinosaur a cultural icon and proposes to describe its ‘life and times.'” Put that on a small wooden panel and use it in your worship.
Tocqueville, who was not wrong about many things, said of Americans that we had a weakness for abstract terms, noting that such words “make expression quicker but conceptions less clear. I wonder if vagueness may not have a secret charm for talkers and writers in these lands. Democratic citizens,” he continued, “will often have vacillating thoughts and so language must be loose enough to leave them play.”
No dope, Tocqueville, and no freakin’ icon, either.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
