Thumbnails and icons - the language of crap ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

23 November

If you know anyone in the Greek Orthodox or Russian Orthodox traditions, and see their saints around the home in places that mean something to them, you might find it hard to relate those portable gilt pictures to the images on your desktop (so called, although it will often enough be the screen of a laptop, and, unlike any but the most exceptionally busy tops of desks, rarely seen), which link to My documents, Internet Explorer, or the Recycle bin (where there is little evidence of recycling - you can't even open the items in it without 'restoring' them, and who ever did more than take something out of a bin, not restore it?).

Now, I'll grant you that that rather uneasy word 'iconoclastic' has been with us in this world a very long time, but we never use it in its original sense, which is more akin to Cromwell's forces and the literal acts of de-facing, but more as a semi-Byronesque description of rocking the boat in a big way. Still, little explanation why these desktop images should be icons, any more than Madonna or Cher being 'a gay icon', or James Dean or Marilyn Monroe screen ones. (As I revise this, I find that my mind has done work for me, by bringing in what many an icon embraces - the Madonna and Child - by implication.)

Little explanation, unless you believe that, when terms were conceived for these purposes, the originators were laughing up their sleeves at the idea of everyone in the future talking about which version they were running. Just as if someone, in an alternative world, would be being urged not to click on an icon (or thumbnail), but, say, to touch a pussy, with different cats denoting what the swirly 'e' of Explorer or that stylized folder for documents (for some reason lying on its back) represent.

Maybe that fantasy's not true to whatever happened with these names, and I do quite like the word 'browser' (which people, though, little use), but what about these Chinese take-aways called things like Jade Gate, which I am led to believe directly translate to depicting the vagina ? Is that a big joke at everyone's expense ? And so, finally, to that Not the Nine O'Clock News sketch, with made up names for Thai food that sound like 'cock' and 'dick', and also the scene in Alas Smith and Jones where an approximation of the Javanese Gamelan is being played by our two: in one of the common bars' rests that are a feature of such music, Mel turns to Griff and simply says 'Is it me, or is this just crap ?', and then they carry on playing.


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