What a drag it is getting old

Having pointed out on Tuesday that Iconic Band Iz Iconic, could the local fishwrap -- having moved the story to the front for Friday -- simply report that the Stones are going to play downtown in June? No, guess not.

Perhaps someone could have read the front page and thus saved some space in the 5C gossip column by not including another announcement of the tour:

You could almost be forgiven for wondering why it took the Sterling Heights Halo just a year to become an icon on 2A:

Remember, every time you delete "iconic," an angel tucks a cigarette into the peghead and hits "Satisfaction."

Elongated iconic double-dip

What better than the Rolling Stones (and their iconic tongue logo) to illustrate the One  Thing to take away about "iconic"? 

If it's iconic, you don't have to say so. If it ain't iconic, no amount of saying so will make it so. Amen.

Conveniently, the local fishwrap rams the point home with a second double-dip "iconic" story in the same section. Apparently unable to find a home in the Monday paper, the Super Bowl advertising story was a frontpage centerpiece on Tuesday:

But it's Fiat Chrysler, so one can't be enough:

We're not in the word-banning business around here, but consider yourselves empowered to delete "iconic" on sight. 

If it sounds like writing ...

"Iconic Detroit novelist" is a properly formed Elongated Yellow Fruit, sure, but "iconic" needs an analytic category all its own. Especially when you have two of them in the first five lines of a blurb about a movie, and double-especially when it's about the writer who would have advised you to "leave out the parts that readers tend to skip."

The "iconic" plague is persistent in these parts. We seem to have trouble writing about Buddy's Pizza without it. Here's Dec. 5:

 And Dec. 7:

If we could summon him with an eight-square Buddy's and a six-pack of Stroh's, Elmore Leonard might remind us that if an institution is genuinely iconic, you're wasting time to remind people. But he might just file that under the broader admonition that if stuff sounds like writing, you should rewrite it.

Double hat trick of iconic forbidden things

This is one of those issues you live for in Copy Editor Bingo: a Triple Forbidden Things Score on one page,  bisected by a Triple Forbidden Word Score running vertically through the A section.

At top, on the business front, there's a Stupid Question in the hed, followed by an "iconic" teeing up a perfectly formed Elongated Yellow Fruit in the second graf:

Called the "Sole of the UX," the tires were revealed at Elliott’s New York Fashion Week after-party on February 9. They were modeled after Elliott's AF1 shoe partnership with Nike. The iconic perforated leather shoes, which retail for $150 a pair, are sold out on Nike's website. 

What really makes the magic, though, is the intersecting iconic axis, starting on page 2A:

and going on to the second business page (12A):

 We're not in the word-banning business around here, really. But some shops can feel free to put particular words off limits until the susceptible get over it. In rule form, it goes something like: If you're tempted to call something "iconic," that's a sign that you don't need to.