Idiosyncratic? You Bet!
If there are two related words that are overused at the moment they’d be icon and its cousin/brother iconic. Of course, when someone throws either one of them into a sentence we know what they mean; something from a list of synonyms that include idol, paragon, hero/heroine, celebrity, superstar, favourite, and darling.
Take whichever sense you want and substitute icon instead. One size fits all, no tricky thinking or decision-making involved and every child player wins a prize.
When I started researching the Barossa leg of our trip to South Australia last November, there it was again, being used by none other than James Halliday, who has no doubt attracted the same descriptor himself. He was, as the astute reader may have gathered, talking about Rockford, and now, having visited the establishment in question there’s no way I’m going to be lured into using the same label.
You want a label for Rockford? Go with idiosyncratic and consider the following synonyms drawn from the lengthy list supplied by the iMac’s dictionary: individualistic, special, one-of-a-kind, unconventional, quirky, offbeat, distinctive.
Yep, idiosyncratic for mine.
Maybe that goes back to my first awareness of Rockford, well before the Little House of Concrete had even been thought of as a possibility. It was back when Ernie Kurtz had the lease to Bowen’s Grand View Hotel. Ernie returned from a stay on Hamilton Island with the news that he’d run across (quote) the best red wine I’ve ever tasted. The fun started when he tried to track down a dozen.
Bearing in mind that we’re looking back fourteen or fifteen years some of the actual details are rather hazy but I seem to recall that the first avenue of inquiry was greeted with a rebuff along the lines of we don’t ship orders to hotels.
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