Icon, in literature, a description of a person or thing, usually using a figure of speech.
Separating the tool from a description of the thing itself is especially hard when we try to think about corners of the world hidden from our senses and then ask what is going on there.
Consider the inextricable combination of accuracy, wit and overkill in this description of a baby pigeon: "The thing was pink, nearly translucent, with magenta cheeks and lavender ovals around the eyes.
2. Like can also be used as a preposition to ask for a description of a person, place or thing.
The physical description of each thing is not a description of its naked physical appearance when isolated from everything else, but its reintegration into the beautiful and intelligent design of the cosmos.
President Obama's speech in Galesburg, Ill., is more a description of how things are than a plan to get them to where they should be.
If we understand the 'social graph' (in the context of a social network like Facebook ) to be a mathematical description of a user and the things, people and places they interact with, then the interest, behavioral and personal graphs will start to enable us to become digitized humans to a greater degree.
I am my father's daughter, Mr. Zuckerman, the daughter of a father who was a stickler for words, and with every passing day, the words that I hear spoken strike me as less and less of a description of what things really are.
They have a large invariance, and looking at them is a little wobbly, meaning you can move the answers around a lot, and you have the same physical thing but your mathematical description of this physical thing has a lot of indeterminacy in it.
He speaks of tiny, indivisible bits called atoms ("all/are sundered into particles of matter") and something that even sounds like a description of DNA ("each thing has but one substance/marked and designed to bring it into being").
