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I had to then run to Google to tease it out. As usual, when you Google for a thing you wanted to know of, you get many bonus pearls of knowledge. Here is an emoticon that flummoxes me even today:
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It is one of those weird things...I heard of iconoclast before I heard the word 'icon'. That was like hearing antihistamines before histamines, or antidote before dote, or counterfeit before feit ;)
This world is full of icons. All religions have their icons, even those who profess that their God is formless. It is impossible to think without images even for the most abstract mathematicians or philosophers. Even formlessness is an attribute of thought.
I was quite amused when Ford came up with their Ikon which, Webster says, is a variant of Icon. Of course Ford's iconic model was his famous T. Why T? Ah, just Google for it and you will find that it was preceded by A, S, and N...heaven knows why.
But the word icon entered popular parlance with the advent of the desktop computer. A girl student came late to my lab class in 1995 and, when I smiled, she gassed:
"I was creating an icon on DB's computer, sir"
For all I knew she could have been busy creating a mouse, the perfect computer icon, nowadays tailless.
Very soon came the new word, emoticon, aka, smiley.
I could guess the hidden meanings of some simple devils like :) and ;) and :(
But not when this reader posted this comment on 'Bose Speakers' (a hit):
1 comment:
I had to then run to Google to tease it out. As usual, when you Google for a thing you wanted to know of, you get many bonus pearls of knowledge. Here is an emoticon that flummoxes me even today:
=:o]
Apparently it is a smiley for:
of all things.
I guess it is time to talk of serious stuff, like the meaning of life.
I read the 700-page pocket book version of Somerset Maugham's 'Of Human Bondage' when I was in my late teens. And found it eminently readable. It was autobiographical, sort of. And there is a passage that stuck, which mentioned a Persian rug as an icon for the meaning of life...Maugham's life...not mine ;)
Bill Clinton
of all things.
I guess it is time to talk of serious stuff, like the meaning of life.
I read the 700-page pocket book version of Somerset Maugham's 'Of Human Bondage' when I was in my late teens. And found it eminently readable. It was autobiographical, sort of. And there is a passage that stuck, which mentioned a Persian rug as an icon for the meaning of life...Maugham's life...not mine ;)
...Thinking of Cronshaw, Philip remembered the Persian rug which he had given
him, telling him that it offered an answer to his question upon the
meaning of life; and suddenly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now
that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till
you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it could ever have
escaped you. The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning... For the same uprush of fancy which had shown him with all the force of
mathematical demonstration that life had no meaning, brought with it
another idea; and that was why Cronshaw, he imagined, had given him the
Persian rug. As the weaver elaborated his pattern for no end but the
pleasure of his aesthetic sense, so might a man live his life, or if one
was forced to believe that his actions were outside his choosing, so might
a man look at his life, that it made a pattern. There was as little need
to do this as there was use. It was merely something he did for his own
pleasure...
Talking of bitten apples I recall this RD joke:
Q: What is worse than biting an apple and finding a worm in it?
A: Half a worm
Weaving a Persian rug for 'the pleasure of aesthetic sense', my foot! He did for MONEY.
Anyway, Maugham confessed that this first novel of his was just a starter. And his best was 'Cakes and Ale', which was, simply speaking, about a nympho. Ha, they knew the meaning of their lives too well...poor chaps.
Our Lord Indra was a renowned male nympho. He was bestowed for it a thousand iconic peacock's eyes adorning his whole body by Sage Gautama for the cardinal sin of seducing his (Gautama's) wife, Ahalya, who was turned into a spotless stone icon.
One of our most popular icons is the Apple of the McIntosh computer. Almost as popular as the Big Apple, an icon for NYC, I don't know why, and don't want to know. Some blessed ignorance is better than prosaic truth.
I don't, nor do I intend to, know the hidden meaning of Apple's icon shown above. In particular, why it is bitten a wee bit. I let my imagination run riot over various possible explanations. Perhaps it had been 'ratified' at night. Rats were all over our Muthukur, though not apples or bushels. We just had bananas and mangoes in our math text unlike RKN who had to mug up his English-printed books:
...There was a fashion in the elementary school in which I read to prescribe a book in which the sums are all about English life. The characters in the problems were all John and Joan and Albert, and the calculations pertained to apples and the fares of hansom-cabs. In those days we saw apples only in coloured picture-books and we never understood what hansom-cabs meant. We were used to dealing in mangoes and jutkas and bullock-carts, and payments were not in farthing or pence, but in rupees, annas and pies. While wrestling with the problems in this book I was always racked with the thought that perhaps I could solve the sums if hey dealt with Indian life. Fortunately, in answer to this prayer we soon had sums dealing with the interminable transactions of Rama and Krishna. But soon I found that this did not make things easier for me. The problems remained as tough as ever, and my wit and calculations remained defeated...
...RKN's 'Higher Mathematics'
Talking of bitten apples I recall this RD joke:
Q: What is worse than biting an apple and finding a worm in it?
A: Half a worm
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