"One who attacks and seeks to overthrow traditional or popular ideas or institutions."

especially since the agora seems to be chock full of ‘em.

I love this word.  Doesn’t it refer to early christians smashing pagan statues to help in conversions?

I suspect that it’s not so much that the Agora’s full of them so much as that iconoclasts tend to be a veryvocal minority.

Or, alternately, we’re all conservatives, we just don’t agree on what to conserve, since no two people (well, except maybe fascists) have quite the same ideas of how the world ‘used to be’. I’m very interested in conserving the ability to speak in the manner of an iconoclast. ;D

Recently confirmed as a logomaniac (As if there were any doubt about that second part),
~Silver

Actually, it referred to those who destroyed Christian icons (considered idolatry)...

Word History: An iconoclast can be unpleasant company, but at least the modern iconoclast only attacks such things as ideas and institutions. The original iconoclasts destroyed countless works of art. Eikonoklastes, the ancestor of our word, was first formed in Medieval Greek from the elements eikon, "image, likeness," and -klastes, "breaker," from klan, "to break." The images referred to by the word are religious images, which were the subject of controversy among Christians of the Byzantine Empire in the 8th and 9th centuries, when iconoclasm was at its height. In addition to destroying many sculptures and paintings, those opposed to images attempted to have them barred from display and veneration. During the Protestant Reformation images in churches were again felt to be idolatrous and were once more banned and destroyed. It is around this time that iconoclast, the descendant of the Greek word, is first recorded in English (1641), with reference to the Byzantine iconoclasts. In the 19th century iconoclast took on the secular sense that it has today, as in "Kant was the great iconoclast" (James Martineau).

-Tim

THanks for clearing that up Tim.  Always as, the whole thing backwards I got. ;D

Pleasure, my.

-Tim