http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/the-hot-button/dont-let-these-words-occupy-your-vocabulary-in-2012/article2288710/
The inaugural list was born at a New Year's Eve party in 1975 when a college relations director bet that he could go home and write up five overused words and phrases. That list consists of timely gems such as "macho" ("seldom pronounced properly and therefore lacks meaningfulness") and "détente" ("invented by Henry Kissinger. Nobody else knows what it means, and now even Kissinger has forgotten").
Most of the words are synonymous with a driving force derived from pop culture. Look no further than the cult-like obsession with Beyoncé's pregnancy for the reasoning behind "baby bump," or the self-explanatory "occupy."
According to Time magazine, "amazing" came out on top with more than 1,500 nominations from anglophones worldwide. Many people complained that the word went stale after being overexposed through reality TV.
-------------
http://www.lssu.edu/banished/current.php
amazing, baby bump, shared sacrifice (only 1 gets on the altar!), occupy, blowback, mancave, the new normal, pet parent.
D - LOL I'm trying to get up to date on popular culture. I have not had cable TV in over a decade, and only read the Globe & Mail (which has included a 'report typo' option recently!). To try to stay in touch with my society more, I began to look at the top 10 search results in Google when I search for a single letter of the alphabet. It has been very illuminating. I know more about reality shows, rappers, hunky sporty men and adolescent female sex kittens than ever before! For example, I can now tell you about the Brit boy-band "One Direction" ... but won't.
There is ONE drawback to not following my own society's pop culture. I will never be able to write The Great Canadian Novel since I lack a sense of the zeitgeist of my time.
Zeitgeist (German pronunciation: [ˈtsaɪtɡaɪst] ( listen)) is "the spirit of the times" or "the spirit of the age." [1] Zeitgeist is the general cultural, intellectual, ethical, spiritual or political climate within a nation or even specific groups, along with the general ambiance, morals, sociocultural direction, and mood associated with an era.
The term is a loanword from German Zeit – "time" (cognate with English "tide" and "time") and Geist – "spirit" (cognate with English "ghost").
For example, take the Google results for the letter "A":
Adele, Apple, Angry Birds, Ashwarya Rai (& Baby), Angelina Joli, Amber Rose, Amber Heard. Of course, since the search is for images, the results are skewed toward attractive celebrity women. But that's OK. <:
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment