The subject came up when yoz and I were talking about the navigation set for h2g2, he was discussing having a consistency in voice, and how the phrase "don't panic" worked in with the rest of the tools. (ie "edit my page" or "search") I told him "don't panic" didn't obey the same rules, it was no longer an imperative command but an cultural icon within the environment of hitchhikker's guide.
Word iconography can happen within any information structure, whether it is a deliberate (website) or organic (narrative) situation. (each develops its own info structure, whether consciously or not.) Sayings or swearing often become more widely used icons, and are often infused with an emotional power. This power can transfer across the lines of various subcultures, but each has a limit before they return to a state of simple words.
"Don't panic" is an example of where the word iconography happened in the original narrative and later deliberately in the creation of the website itself.
What's neat and useful about making word icons in UI design is that they act as the one eyed jacks of an interface where one eyed jacks are wild. Once you have established a set of icons with your audience they can trust you and trust your interface it is much easier. Once you name something you can refer to it. What important about this is understanding where you are and aren doing it, and where you may be speaking to someone that doesn have your language in common.
In legal circles there is something called the term of art; it is a word or phrase that takes on a particular and specific meaning in the context of a certain genre or industry. (usually used in legal circles, but not necessarily) The first example ever explained to me was in math, in the context of describing a function as having contiguity. While the word contiguity has a very general meaning within the context of a function in means that there are no breaks in the graph, and importantly, it can mean nothing else. Contiguity loses its general usefulness, it cannot occupy both spaces at once in the local language.
An simple example of a term of art in the UI design of a webpage is the word home. A furniture company catalogue online that makes product for home or office could not safety put both "home" and office on their navigation. The word home has lost its general use, in exchange for the power of a specific navigation convention used across the Internet. You could substitute house, or residential because the concept isn't lost, merely the specific word. The word home is a word icon on the Internet.
Word icons often have a different emotional charge from their component words. They become a linguistic button we can press anywhere they become meaningful. I mean that in the sense that one of the properties of word icons is an immediate and consistent reaction that doesn't necessarily accompany words that undergo a more lengthy and involved analysis by the reader. They aren't analyzed at all in the traditional way, they act as pointers. They link immediately to the concept they symbolize and unlock that concept in the reader's mind. similarly by pressing that button a user expects a word icon to simply carry them through to a consistent other place. home always takes them to the first page of a site, search always takes them to a small text box they can type a word into to find occurrences of that word within a given context.
It occurred to me while I was reading Lenny Bruce that he had been dealing with word iconography in a societal way. He wanted to drag words like nigger out of their status as word icons and back into a general more thoughtful interpretive use. How? By using them so frequently the listener could no longer count on the emotional symbolism being behind the word.
"If it was nothing but nigger nigger nigger all the time than in six months nigger would mean anything more than 'god bless you' or 'I swear to tell the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth so help me god' and then no nigger kid would have to run home crying because some ofay motherfucker called him nigger."