Feeling Peckish? Need a New Word for Icon?

This might help.

Photo by Ricardo Arce on Unsplash

Isn’t it nice to have the right word at the right time? It can bring you just what you need, just when you need it.

For example, the other night my daughter and her boyfriend and I met some other family for dinner. We gathered at a European-influenced American bistro that’s just reinvented itself and won some acclaim for its varied and nuanced cuisine.

The menu was brief but dense and complex, offering small, medium, and large items featuring things like frico, zhug, tendrils, and togarashi. All the unfamiliar terms left me a bit mystified but I knew for certain that I was only moderately hungry.

I wanted more than a snack but less than a full meal. The baby beets were probably not enough, the chicken too much. I wasn’t sure about the grilled salmon or the mushrooms with black garlic sauce.

After bringing our drinks, our server began describing the menu and suggesting how we might we might go about enjoying it. He was a tall, lanky, expressive man, with lots going on—lots of gestures, armfuls of hammered copper jewelry, an enviably thick and burnished wedge haircut.

He responded to our questions and concerns with a frothy, soothing, almost mesmerizing stream of positivity and affirmation. “Not a problem!” “I got you!” “You’re good!” “I get it, sure!” “Hundred percent we can do that!”

I was getting a little lost in the flow but then he said, “And if you are feeling peckish, you might like the carrot risotto or the littleneck clams with spaghetti and white wine.” And I thought, Sold! Peckish is exactly how I am feeling!

And I zeroed in on the other dishes appearing alongside the risotto and spaghetti in the medium section of the menu and settled on a Caesar salad and some roasted broccolini with whipped ricotta. Peckish—the right word at the right time, bringing me just what I needed, a meal suited to the size of my average appetite.

I also appreciated that I hadn’t heard “peckish” in a while. It’s like having a new toy in my playroom. But maybe “peckish” is gaining currency, as the chart below shows. It tracks the word’s frequency only until 2019, but, as you can see, usage of the word swept up dramatically from about the turn of the century through the first 20 years.

However popular “peckish” may become, I doubt it will ever reach—you know what’s coming—iconic status, as the words “icon” and “iconic” have, and as I have discussed in Taking a Look at an Icon - the Word Itself and Do We Have a New "Icon" Coming Our Way?.

It seems that even AI is on the “icon” and “iconic” bandwagon, as you can see in the image below showing results for my search of “wedge haircut.” I did this search when I was looking into words for describing the hair style of our server at the restaurant where we had dinner.

And the other morning when I was browsing the through the New York Times I ran across an article about a young woman who shows pigs titled "The 'Iconic' State that Conquered the Internet" and I thought, I can’t even . . . . But, of course, I did, and here is the passage that seems to have inspired the article’s title:

“The stare is iconic,” said Madelynn Gardner, 15, who ran up against Karis and her twin brother, Krew, in several contests over the weekend. “It’s a little intimidating.”

I don’t know about you, but it’s a real stretch for me to see how “iconic” can describe a stare. It is not, however, too hard for me to think of alternatives to describe the young woman’s stare. “Intense,” for one. “Commanding,” for another. “Piercing,” “steady.”

I didn’t even need to use Google to come up with those, although I could have, and then when I did search for words to describe a stare “iconic” was not among them. A hopeful sign, maybe, that not everything will become “iconic.”

I also found some alternatives to “icon” playing the Times’ Connections game the other day, as shown in the figure below. So, we have options. We just need to choose them, and in so doing, find the right word, for the right thing, at the right time.

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