Legendary English

Paul Bunyan, King Arthur and the Loch Ness Monster, from left, participated in a Fox News Round Table Discussion last week to complain about misuse of the word “legendary”.
Among the shifts in the English language that drive me nuts is the migration of the word “legendary”. It’s gone from meaning “mythical” to “very famous” to “something people talk about”.
My newspaper in Bangkok, a city that doesn’t get that many truly famous visitors, has taken to calling every foreign DJ who’s playing in town “legendary”. This can only fleetingly be blamed on the absence of any genuine music stars, like “the legendary Bob Dylan” for example.
We did have a brief public appearance by Jimmy Page this year (see this post), whose quick set onstage with the local guitarists while on holiday in Thailand was reported in The Nation, sure enough, as an evening with “the legendary Led Zeppelin axeman”.
I got to edit that, and changed the word — as I always do with the DJs and would certainly do in the case of Bob Dylan as well — to something else. “Celebrated” is the usual fall-back choice in these circumstances, even it’s not always satisfactory either. In Page’s case I settled on “guitar hero” and allowed him a “rock god” too. There’s not much confusion in the public mind between divine gods and those on earth.
“Legendary” obviously infuses the subject with a lot of weight, which is ideal for promoting their shows or, in the case of Czech photographer Josef Koudelka, their images. Art Daily, which is a valuable website despite offering nothing but verbatim press releases, this week carried the headline “Koudelka’s Legendary Photographs of the Prague Invasion to be Shown in Miami”.
No doubt Miami Dade College supplied the headline as well as the report on the exhibition documenting the 1968 Soviet invasion but, as remarkable as the photos are, given their graphic drama and historical value, how can a snapshot become “legendary”?
Over the years we’ve become accustomed to hearing journalists (and the publicists whose bums they caress) referring to “the legendary Marilyn Monroe” and “the legendary James Dean”, which might suggest that dying young is a criterion for the honorific. Kerouac just slips in there, but more people regard Neal Cassady, the supercharged real-life hero of his best book, who also died in his early 40s, as legendary.
Frank Sinatra was accepted without question as “a legend in his own time”, as was Hemingway in some circles. Today, is Edward Murrow legendary? What about Ed Sullivan? Why don’t you hear about the Beatles being legendary? Yes, two of them are still alive, but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen the phrase “the legendary John Lennon”. There’s more!

In “Endgame 1945″, David Stafford lays out the grim reality of what kept right on happening. Atrocities continued even as the veil was torn from the concentration camps. In peacetime, inflamed partisans imposed terrible vengeance on their wartime masters. Displaced persons were everywhere — it must have seemed like all of Europe was on the move.
One of the world’s most tenacious (and thus successful) reporters, Glenny roams that world flipping over rocks to expose the handful of fungal roots that link just about every mob there is. The roots extend into your home, obviously if you smoke ganja or buy pirate DVDs, but less obviously if you’ve been the innocent victim of an online phishing scam.















