The words covered in this article are dogma, conformity and nonconformity, allude and allusion, allegory, and dogmatic. Previously done words that will reoccur today are metaphor, iconoclasm, figurative, revere, explicit, implicit, heretical, monotonous, and irony.
You know now that iconoclasm is the deliberate destruction within a culture of that culture’s own religious icons and other symbols or monuments.
Most religious and political revolutions involve the breaking of the cherished images and icons of the previous regimes. Historically, the word ‘iconoclast’ was used for people such as the Byzantine emperor Leo III and his son, that is, people who engaged in or supported iconoclasm. Today, however, the word ‘iconoclast’ is more often applied figuratively, to any person who challenges established dogma or conventions.
Dogma
The noun dogma means an established belief or principle that everyone accepts unquestioningly to be true.
When Norman Lewis defines the word iconoclast in (Session 28 of) Word Power Made Easy, it is the figurative sense of the word that he is describing:
“You are violently against established beliefs, revered traditions, cherished customs- such, you say, stand in the way of reform and progress and are always based on superstition and irrationality. Religion, family, marriage, ethics- you weren’t there when these were started and you’re not going to conform simply because most unthinking people do. You are an iconoclast.”
Conformity-Nonconformity
Conformity means agreement. When you conform to a social rule, you act in agreement with it; you do what the rule says you should do. Most people conform because they fear facing the wrath of the society if they don’t.
The word comes from the Latin prefix com-, meaning ‘together’ and formare, meaning ‘to form’, and, therefore, means ‘to form together; that is, to be identical in form or character.’
Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments are a classic in psychology. Watch one in the following video:
Now watch the commercial below, widely believed to be one of the greatest advertisements of all times.
The lady who is throwing a hammer at the screen is an iconoclast, literally, because she is destroying the image of a leader to whom everybody else in the advertisement seems to unblinkingly and respectfully listen.
This ad alludes to the novel 1984 by George Orwell. The book is set in a fictional totalitarian state that is governed by a fearsome dictator called Big Brother whose forces ruthlessly crush any person suspected of even a minor disagreement with the state propaganda.
Allude
The verb allude means to make an indirect reference to. Such an indirect reference is called an allusion. These words are made up of:
- Latin word ludere, which means ‘to play’, and
- the prefix ad-, meaning ‘to’
and therefore mean, ‘to make a playful reference to something.’ The board game ludo comes from the same Latin root.
The ‘1984’ ad is an allegory.
Allegory
An allegory is such a story, poem or image that symbolically represents an idea that is not explicitly stated.
The word comes by combining the Greek word allos, ‘other’ with agoreuein, ‘to speak publicly’ and therefore its original sense was ‘to speak about other things publicly [ these ‘other’ things acting as code words for what you really wanted to convey].’
In ancient Greece, the word ‘agora’ meant an open public space where everybody assembled to hang out, discuss matters or to hear the proclamations of their king. Because agoras had heavy footfall, enterprising merchants put up their stalls there and with time, the word came to also be used in the sense of ‘marketplace.’ The whole town came to shop or saunter in this central plaza. This was the go-to place to meet someone by prior appointment. However, for two people who were meeting to discuss a subject that was forbidden or frowned upon by the state, it was not safe to say exactly what was on their mind, because you never knew who in the crowd of people nearby was listening to you carefully, with the intention of reporting your heretical words to the police. It was better, when in a public place like the agora, to talk about ‘other things’, using no incriminating words at all, employing a pre-decided code that got your message across to your intended listener, but to anybody else, would seem like a fairly innocent conversation. Thus was born the art of the allegory.
Aesop’s fables and other stories that convey a moral lesson that is not explicitly stated in the storyline are examples of allegories. For example, The Hare and the Tortoise teaches us the virtue of moderate, regular progress, but this message is conveyed implicitly; at its surface, the story is just about a race that two animals ran.
You might wonder about whether allegory is not another fancy word for metaphor, since they both convey their message symbolically. Well, the difference between allegories and metaphors lies in their length. A metaphor can be a word, phrase or a line (she was the apple of her father’s eye; he was her rock etc.), while allegories are much longer: they are full-length stories, movies, paintings, songs or poems that seem to tell one story at the surface, but when you look deeper, you discover another idea/message that it conveys symbolically.
Let’s see how the 1984 ad is an allegory.
The setting of an all-powerful dictator who has the masses under his complete control represents the hypothetical scenario where IBM, the market-leader in the personal computers industry in early 1980s, has been able to erase all competitors and establish its monopoly. In this scenario, the computer users would be reduced to a status no better than that of the zombie-slaves shown in the ad, with whom the Big Brother can do as he likes. This would be a world of boring uniformity (as portrayed by the dull gray-blue color palette of the ad) in which everybody thinks the same and is the same.
The woman with the sledgehammer of course represents Apple. Her vibrant orange shorts and her energetic, bold manner stand out against the monotonous sameness of the still figures sitting in the auditorium. She is the sole rebel in that sea of universal conformity.
The guards are trying to catch the woman and to silence her, but she keeps running towards the screen with single-minded focus. This symbolizes Apple’s fearlessness in carrying out its mission, no matter what repressive tactics IBM may use.
The woman breaks the screen and that’s when we see the first sign of emotion on the zombies’ faces. They have been liberated. Apple is conveyed to be a force that would free people from IBM’s iron-grip.
So, through this ad, Apple sought to portray itself as a rebel brand, a brand that stood for nonconformity, a brand meant for people who were not content being unthinking zombies (which was everybody!). It succeeded in this objective. The ad was first played in Super Bowl and was such a sensation that it was discussed on news bulletins and in newspapers for the next few days.
We will continue a discussion of Apple’s marketing strategy in Day 15. But before that, let’s do a new word related to dogma.
Dogmatic
The adjective dogmatic can mean one of two things:
- related to the noun dogma
- stubbornly sticking to one’s beliefs, asserting that they are the only correct beliefs there can be and not willing to listen to any other point of view at all. The opposite words to this meaning of dogmatic would be: flexible, open-minded, adaptable.
Scientists are not dogmatic as they are driven by experimental results. If something turns up which contradicts the prevalent line-of-thought, they change their belief and create a new theory which can accommodate the new results. For example, Francis Crick, the man who co-discovered the DNA with James Watson, had once said that the central dogma of Molecular Biology was:
"DNA makes RNA makes protein."
This dogma held sway until some virus hunters discovered that there are viruses that have no DNA in them at all and yet they are able to infect cells and multiply.
Before we go, here are more usage examples for the words we learnt today:
- Science grows through a willingness to challenge old dogma. To develop a new idea, a person first needs the courage to question the conventional wisdom.
- “Our daughter’s mind seems to be elsewhere these days,” Mr. Smith said to his wife one evening, alluding to their usually high-achieving teenager’s poor performance in a recent school test.
- When the new governess failed to admire the large newly purchased and expensive new car, and lightly alluded to the superior advantages of one or two models which had just been put on the market, the discomfort of her mistress became almost comical.
- The painting below is an allegory for human life. It shows five people – an old man, a young couple and two children – and five ships. The distance of each ship from the harbor symbolizes the distance that one of these five humans has covered since birth. For example, the ship that is the farthest away from the shore, fading into the setting horizon, represents the old man who is similarly on the verge of fading into the great unknown of death.
- Steve Jobs in his 2005 Stanford Commencement Address:
- “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
- As parenting is already a tough job, parents should not make it tougher by being dogmatic. They should shed rigid assumptions so that their children can feel confident that their viewpoint too will be considered, even if it contradicts their parents’, and their individuality respected.
- A Pew Research Center study found that in 2010, 38 percent of the surveyed young Americans aged 18 to 29 had at least one tattoo. This fact recalled to my mind something I’d read in an essay by New York Times columnist David Brooks, titled Nonconformity Is Skin Deep:
“A cadre of fashion-forward types thought they were doing something to separate themselves from the vanilla middle classes but are now discovering that the signs etched into their skins are absolutely mainstream. They are at the beach looking across the acres of similar markings and learning there is nothing more conformist than displays of individuality, nothing more risk-free than rebellion, nothing more conservative than youth culture.
Another generation of hipsters, laid low by the ironies of consumerism.”
See you in Day 15!