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Read the following dictionary definitions of the adjective...

Read the text to answer questions 48 to 50.


As a linguist, I understand that language shifts and changes. The voiced z sound of houses is being replaced by an unvoiced s sound. The abbreviation A.I. has become a verb, as in “He A.I.ed it.” Neologisms abound, and new words often make us think of things in new ways.

But I don’t adopt all of the changes. I still say houses with a z. I avoid some new words that seem too flash-in-the-pan (like cheugy and delulu). By the time I might begin using them, they are probably already on their way out. Some bits of neology, I used ironically at first, but soon found myself adopting as part of my everyday vocabulary, and dropped them. Still, there are some usages that I can’t quite bring myself to embrace.

One is iconic. Everywhere I turn, I hear something described as the most iconic: movies, songs, sports figures, fictional characters, vehicles, photographs. Iconic has shifted to mean “famous.” My experience with the word comes from the semiotic triad of icon, index, and symbol, three of the 66 categories of signs proposed by the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce. For me, icons are visual representations: they resemble something. Dictionaries have now added definitions like “widely recognized and well-established” or “widely known and acknowledged especially for distinctive excellence.” Iconic has widened its meaning, but I haven’t come along.


(Edwin L. Battistella. https://blog.oup.com/2025/01/some-barely-iconic-epic-usages/. Adaptado)

Read the following dictionary definitions of the adjective iconic, and select the one that matches the author’s understanding of the word:


A

“relating to or characteristic of a famous person or thing that represents something of importance”.


B

“widely considered to epitomize an era, culture, community, place etc.”.


C

“being a famous person or thing that people admire and see as a symbol of a particular idea, way of life”.


D

“widely known and acknowledged especially for distinctive excellence”.


E

“showing a relationship between the form of a sign, such as a word or a symbol, and its meaning”.