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Posts Tagged ‘Icon’

Do you want to be an icon? Can an icon come to you live?

If a newscaster was a zombie, would he be reporting live, dead, half-live or half-dead?

Oh, you say, some newscasters definitely are zombies – “the walking dead.” Especially those reading teleprompters or scripts without knowing what they’re reading.

Television news programs particularly like the word live. That word, they think, gives the event special significance, presence, exclusivity. I’ve been watching the Vancouver Winter (that’s win’er for many broadcasters) Olympics. And the TV promotion says “coming to you live from Vancouver, Canada!” But actually the report is at least three-hours delayed.

But, “it’s recorded live!” How else could it have been recorded? Maybe to keep costs down, NBC could occasionally record something dead. Like the headline I saw on AOL News: “Terrorist Shot Dead Live.”

Now another common term is icon, as in “living icon,” “a movie icon,” “a baseball icon.” My question is: Can an icon come to you live?

Primary meaning of icon: “In Eastern church [Orthodox church], a representation of some sacred personage, as Christ or a saint or angel, painted usually on a wood surface and venerated itself as sacred.” Secondary meaning: “A picture, image, or other representation.” I won’t get into computer “icons” as that technology has redefined hundreds of old words, like “mouse.”

An “icon” is an artistic representation of a dead holy person. So how do stars like Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Hank Aaron, Sidney Poitier, etc., become “icons”? Simple. Through live TV, which as we have seen could be delayed broadcasting.

The media is getting sloppy in its use of language, and it is changing many of its viewers in the same way. Gone is the preciseness of speech by broadcasters like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow and more recently Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings.

Now we have copywriters writing error-filled scripts read by broadcasters who spend little time editing or understanding what they’re reading. So we get NBC’s “iconic” Meredith Vieira coming to you more or less live from Vancouver: “Classic mix-up: NBC confuses Terry Fox and Michael J. Fox.” To top it off, the Yahoo news writer used the word “classic” to mean – I have little idea what. Perhaps “embarrassing” or “ignorant.” Certainly not “classic.”

Do you want to speak good English well? Don’t trust the media to teach you.

Thanks for reading this classic article, written live by the iconic Robert the Robert.