Words are as subject to fashion as morals and lapels, politics and popular music.

Today's merely tiresome coinage is tomorrow's infuriatingly ubiquitous cliche. Executives with important titles speak a pidgin of pseudo-scientific empowerment learned from corporate directives and management apocrypha, written in a patois that has seeped into general use: pushing the envelope, thinking outside the box, tree stretching, helicopter views, vertical sausaging matrixes.

Journalese, too, thrives on cliche. It is the jargon of the linguistically insentient whose job is to smother page upon page with words. And there are more pages than ever, and more screens, and thus more marginally literate word-operatives struggling to smother them.

Where would they be without the following, the props of their desperate trade? Genius, guru, hub, legend, driver (meaning cause), challenging, controversial, cool, edgy, default, diverse, holistic, multicultural, postmodern and the newly transitive verbs to impact, to source. Where, above all, would they be without iconic?

Here are some nouns and compound nouns that have been prefixed by this most dismal of vogue words. These are all found constructions of recent provenance: none is my invention.

Iconic albino, iconic assassin, iconic baby lotion, iconic brand, iconic bridge, iconic bucket, iconic building, iconic button fly, iconic campervan, iconic car, iconic cassoulet, iconic CCTV camera, iconic celebration, iconic chainsaw, iconic chair, iconic chef, iconic chimpanzee, iconic children's entertainer, iconic clock, iconic cocktail, iconic comb, iconic combover, iconic comedy, iconic cooling tower, iconic cricket bat, iconic crisps, iconic doll, iconic dreadlocks, iconic drinker, iconic earthmover, iconic escalator, iconic enema, iconic field armour, iconic film star, iconic fishing reel, iconic flat cap, iconic garden, iconic goggles, iconic gorilla, iconic grocery, iconic guitarist, iconic hairstyle, iconic halo, iconic handshake, iconic hanging laundry, iconic hazard, iconic high heels, iconic hitman, iconic house, iconic ice cream, iconic icon, iconic injury, iconic itinerary, iconic jihad target, iconic jigsaw, iconic jingle, iconic jockey, iconic joke, iconic kitchen utensil, iconic knife, iconic knowledge, iconic lawnmower, iconic leprechaun, iconic light fitting, iconic lion, iconic lip balm, iconic mascara, iconic milkshake, iconic mittens, iconic moment, iconic moustache, iconic mouthwash, iconic movie, iconic murder, iconic noose, iconic ointment, iconic orangutan, iconic palace, iconic panda, iconic penis, iconic perfume, iconic philosophy, iconic photograph, iconic pig, iconic pimp, iconic playwright, iconic plumber, iconic pub, iconic radiator, iconic relationship, iconic restaurant, iconic retail mall, iconic robot, iconic rodent, iconic saddle, iconic sandwich, iconic sausage, iconic shoehorn, iconic shop, iconic silhouette, iconic snack food, iconic soft drink, iconic submachinegun, iconic sunglasses, iconic surgeon, iconic taxi, iconic terrorist, iconic toaster, iconic toilet seat, iconic tracksuit, iconic tractor, iconic treehouse, iconic trenchcoat, iconic typeface, iconic vending machine, iconic vindaloo, iconic wedding dress, iconic welder, iconic wheelchair, iconic wine, iconic yak, iconic yogurt, iconic zip hoodie.

The scope here suggests there is nothing that cannot be deemed iconic. Iconic, that is, in the sense acquired through recent abuse. Though quite what that sense is is not readily determined. The Oxford English Dictionary takes its earliest citation for iconic as "designating a person or thing regarded as representative of a culture or movement; important or influential in a particular (cultural) context" from Newsweek in 1976.

One may hazard a guess that it was current some years before that in the jargon-dense groves of academe where truisms are pompously dressed to lend them importance. According to Jesse Sheidlower, American editor of the OED, The New York Times's usage of iconic has increased from 11 instances in 1988 to 141 in 1998 to 442 in 2008. He warns that this is an extremely crude gauge of a word's currency.

But if a normally scrupulous newspaper such as The New York Times employs iconic more than once a day, it is all too easy to figure the word's incidence in the less linguistically prescriptive newspapers.

It is evident that the OED definition is no longer adequate, for this is a word whose meanings have forked and forked again in a delta formation. What the word now signifies is fuzzily approximate. Yet, despite its promiscuous ascription to some improbable bedfellows (bucket and lion), it is far from meaningless. It seems to have a multitude of meanings: notable, celebrated, zealously promoted, revered, long established, covert, authentic, enviable, easily recognised, memorable, important, estimable, stereotypical and atypical, representative and unusual, cliquey and popular, recherche and accessible, and -- like the word itself -- unavoidable.

Perhaps I should withdraw that "far from meaningless"; if a word can signify anything it will eventually signify nothing. It may have already achieved that literally insignificant state. Nonetheless, its very ubiquity is telling. It reveals a collective longing, a wishfulness. Like "cult" (used adjectivally), it carries a chummily sacred, cosily religiose, softly spiritual connotation.

We live in an era of incontinent celebration and exponential hyperbole. Everything is world-class. An innings that once may have been described as good is today awesome. Any rock band that survives narcotic depredation and managerial peculation to re-form in wizened middle age is legendary. Artisans going quietly about their business in the back of beyond, baking loaves or gutting herrings, find themselves declared food heroes.

Every area of enterprise aspires to a grandiose awards ceremony: the Organic Semi-conductor Industry Awards, the Demolition Oscars, the Contract Cleaning Baftas, and, of course, the Awards Industry Awards. All of them strive to emulate the Academy Awards, all of them make fleeting heroes of hod carriers or logistics resource analysts, all of them add to the sum of bathos. The lad mag GQ lamentably names an Icon of the Year. The day cannot be far off when al-Jazeera hosts the Martyrdom DVD Awards, though the winner may be unable to be with ustonight.

Given the collective appetite for idolatry, it is apt that iconic should be the adjective of the age. For although icon derives from a Greek word signifying no more than a likeness, a portrait or an image, it has for centuries been indissolubly linked to Christian images of Jesus, Mary, the agony, the deposition and so on. Such images were the targets of the original iconoclasts, aghast at the temerity of those who dared give visual form to the Trinity. Even before it was first adopted by the Eastern church, the word icon was tainted by association with the superstitions that humans fortify themselves with. The Anatolian city of Konya was formerly known as Iconium. It supposedly got that name from the shrine erected there either to its alleged protector Ares, the merciless god of war whose Roman incarnation was Mars, or to Perseus who decapitated the gorgon Medusa -- her dead serpentine head was transformed into a sort of amulet whose representation is called a gorgoneion, that is, gorgon icon.

Implicit in the modern use of iconic is the perhaps deliberate, perhaps unwitting aspiration to invest things and people with properties that render them miraculous and superhuman, magical and godlike. It is today's expression of humankind's perennial bent towards aggrandisement and worship of other humans, of human inventions, of things: rocks, clouds, forests, tides, charms, relics. And if those, why not E-types or Zippos?

Why not rock stars (whose debauches are puny beside those of Greek or Hindu gods)? But no matter how puny, how could the insipid, anodyne, milk-and-one-sugar-please God of the Anglicans have competed with such antic Pans as Mick Jagger, such Dionysiac groins as Robert Plant's? Farrokh Bulsara's decision to call himself Freddie Mercury was prescient, he became a mythic prophecy he had to fulfil. If churches can't provide appropriate gods, we must make our own. Or allow ourselves to be seduced into worship of self-appointed gods and antinomian furies.

One of the dafter ideas propagated by the credulous is that the tyrannies of the 20thcentury owe their enormities to their atheism. The Third Reich, Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's China were theocracies whose dependence on the iconic was as great as their dependence on terror, on neighbours grassing each other up, on lies as gross as those of any established faith. Dictators routinely attempt to kill God so that they may usurp him, then act like malevolent forces of nature, wreak divine vengeance, massacre innocents. They sack churches, raze temples, burn texts. The next steps on the roadto genocide are all art direction and liturgical choreography.

Until his triumph in the Great Patriotic War, after which he was depicted as a genial orphaned absolutist, Stalin often would be shown in paintings as a peripherally positioned member of a group of equals or as Lenin's acolyte, as though Lenin was the father in heaven and he the mere son doing his father's will on Soviet earth. The implication was exculpatory: the living son's errors might actually be the dead father's. The largely illiterate population of his empire knew Stalin only pictorially, through accessible icons. The iconic figure and the man were indivisible.

Hitler was more audacious. His appearance was as measured as his rehearsed ranting. He reduced himself to a few pictorial marks and gestures: the salute, the moustache, the bang of hair. So no matter how protean he might be, no matter whether he was represented as a Teutonic knight, a little guy fighting for hispeople's entitlement, a reliable provincial station master, a mountain visionary or a revolutionary vanguard, he was instantly recognisable. The modern world's Apollyon turned himself into something literally picturesque, something iconic.

The swastika was a logo. But it was neither an abstraction nor a theft from Jainism. It was a calculatedly didactic icon, pregnant with meaning. In German it is the hakenkreutz, the hooked cross: a graphic twisting of Christianity's paramount symbol. The Nuremberg rallies were rites that underlined the link between the martial and the sacred. As terrifying as an Aztec ceremony and as hokey as amateur operetta, they remain indelibly fixed on the retina that witnesses them.

Their decor lives on in the stadium-rock stage sets designed for the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and others by Mark Fisher, who is among Albert Speer's understandably few apostles. These shows are mock-heroic while aspiring to be heroic tout court. And they're pompous: altars for flashy pasteboard messiahs. Yet the tawdry grandeur is potent, just as cheap music is meant to be; the spectacle can rouse us, despite ourselves. Here is the very quality that is Condition A of the truly iconic. It affects us whether we like it or not.

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