I winced at the newspaper’s summary of its editorial: “Tony Blair would be a charismatic figurehead” — for the European Union — “but....” My main objection was political: I found it grotesque that an independent Europe could even think of giving its top job to a past poodle of the White House. But I had another objection: charismatic.
Straight from ancient Greek, charisma is a perfectly usable word, and so is its adjective. But both are overused these days, and often misused. A man with charisma has an aura — of power, maybe, of goodness, intelligence, spirituality, maybe just personal charm — that draws people to him. What the words don’t mean is simply a great guy or even more simply we approve. Gandhi had charisma by the bucketful. So does Nelson Mandela. But so did Hitler, Stalin and many other past villains. Not so Mikhail Gorbachev, great guy as I think him, and much to be approved of.
Thus far, The Times was right. It knows what charismatic means, and its “but” about Blair came for just that reason: it doesn’t want a man with charisma as the EU’s president. But it was mistaken, in my view, to apply the word to Blair. Whatever his past success, his present charisma in Britain is very little. Ditto in the Israeli/Arab world, where he is meant to be mediating. He “stops the traffic” in Washington, his admirers claim. Could be, but Britons are apt to over-rate other Britons’ status in America. Would he “stop the traffic” in India? You tell me.
I see these as matters of fact, not political judgment. Charismatic is cheapened by being too widely applied, as any word can be. If a flower is just red, don’t call it scarlet. If soldiers are brave, don’t call them all heroes (as Britain’s media do today for its troops in Afghanistan). It’s painful to be hit with a police lathi, but it isn’t torture. Charismatic has become a cliché, and is losing its meaning — its charisma, I’m almost tempted to say, flouting my own advice.
Nor is it alone. Its cousin iconic is rapidly joining it. Icon is another old Greek word, literally a likeness. In English, it has one specialized usage in precisely that sense, in an inter-Christian dispute: the Vatican says women cannot be priests, because (inter alia) no woman can be an ‘icon’ of the male Christ. My anti-Catholic prejudices riposte with the first book of the Bible: “God created man in his own image... male and female created he them”. But let’s leave that to the theologians.
Less precisely, we find this sense in the modern icon of computer screens: a symbol vaguely like the facility it refers to. Much older, and even now maybe better known, is the use of icon for the pictures of Jesus Christ, his mother or other saints, in Greek and Russian churches. It’s this usage that has swelled into today’s avalanche of icon and iconic for any and every revered, admired, popular, well-known or even merely unusual person or object in any field.
Sportsmen, politicians, actors, physicists, pop groups; mountains, buildings, ships, designer furniture, shoes, handbags, perfumes: anything, these days, can be called an icon. Last week I met iconic applied to a clock that overhangs Winchester’s high street — a nearby city which that clock no more symbolizes, to its citizens or anyone else, than this column symbolizes The Telegraph.
If you must call Everest, the Taj Mahal, the Howrah Bridge, Gandhi or — I’ll stretch a point — maybe even Sourav Ganguly iconic or charismatic, so be it. But those words are losing their bite. They’re the tired journalist’s way out of thinking up sharper ones. Sure, we hacks often are tired and must think up a lot of words in a short time. But even we should go easy on these two. People under less pressure should simply drop them, until they’ve regained some real sense. The Wordcage can aspire to be an ornament. An icon it ain’t.
