iconoclast
eye-CON-uh-clast
noun
A person who attacks established or traditional concepts and principles; a destroyer of religious images or sacred objects
Stonehenge has been in the news more than usual in the last few days. Friday was the summer solstice, and so, as is tradition, a ragtag bunch of beardy weirdies, white people with dreadlocks, and healthy late-middle-aged M&S types gathered around Stonehenge to watch the sunrise. Earlier in the week, however, two people with nothing better to do on a Wednesday afternoon daubed Stonehenge in orange paint, in protest against the ancient monument’s unprecedented carbon footprint, or something.
Such pantomimes have become increasingly common in the last couple of years. One doesn’t have to wait long before some fruitcake lobs a fruit cake at the Mona Lisa, or pours soup over The Haywain, or glues themselves to the Magna Carta. But this sort of thing isn’t actually new. The Penelopes and Tillys and Bartholemews of this world are just the latest in a long line of iconoclasts, joining a tradition stretching back into antiquity, from Ancient Egypt and the Roman Empire, through China’s cultural revolution to the destruction wrought by the Taliban and Islamic State.
But I digress. The word is pure Greek in origin, deriving from the words ‘eikon’ meaning, perhaps unsurprisingly, ‘icon’ and ‘klao’ meaning ‘to break’. ‘Icon’ is easy enough to understand, being an increasingly common word in the era of mass computing, but when used here it has a specific, much narrower meaning. Icons, in the religious sense, are sacred images usually used in some kind of devotional context. ‘Klao’ does not feature in many words in modern English, the only other one I could find was ‘pyroclastic’ (‘broken by fire’), referring to material ejected from a volcano.