I remember that in the late 1990s, descriptions of, being “edgey” particularly, filmmakers, was big. I always thought of someone who had consumed six or more fu-fu coffees, or, simply had ADD, and happened to be the creative type. That’s because what had been described as “edgey” seemed more a disorder than anything else, and the only danger was that you might not get your way. Words. Whattaya gonna do? D.T., the world’s biggest bull shitter, calls his social media platfrom, Truth Social. It’s the Great Era of Lies with likes of George Santos, the Rosa Parks of liars, and, these liars love the ridiculous buzzwords hiding what is simply true – weaponization, deep state, et al.
Likewise, i just ran into a Times article, stating, “If New Yorkers are unflappable, impervious and stoic on the sidewalk, we are raging, delighted, terrified, dancing, sobbing messes in the subway tunnels…” To use another overworked cliche – you repulsed me at “unflappable.”
Avoidance of language based on language, business and transactions of the moment, instead of language based on things themselves, has resulted in the collection, that I just can’t wrap my head around these words, and the only way to pivot is with skin in the game, so that at the end of the day it will be a super game-changer and empower me, because it’s fact, it’s baked into the optics, so that, at the end of the day, it is awesome.
When Betty White died they, of course, described her as 99 years young, which makes no sense, and a “national treasure”? My mistake. When i think about this land treasures, our National Parks, Lincoln and Crazy Horse are first to vome to mind.. Our priorities, national and otherwise, reveal our conflicted awareness of the death process. It’s like saying someone is in a better place after they die which we actually know nothing about, beyond hope-based faith. We seculars love entertainment above most things. Our little buzzwords are not aphorisms. There is no philosophy with buzz words, most of which, have a short shelf life. I just used a buzzword. They are quick, descriptive and functional, simplifying, often in one word metaphors, that fit well in media time slots, dealing with massive amounts of data to simplify and get out to the public quickly. If you want easily accessible access to proper spoken English, one model, literally, are news anchors who are masters of the baseline and proper language, and, coincidentally, use extensive buzzwording. There is hope, 24/7, hangry and good-to-go have become staples and for good reason. They work. There is no pretension, only function and their sound.
Most importantly, it’s a fact, to discover proper English and diction, simply watch any mainstream news show, and this baseline extends into what they talk about, non-stop remembrances for mainstream events and holidays, what day it is, or, anything that unites the greatest number of people in the use of proper English in America.
Wanna make money? Open your business and products to everyone. It’s in economics that baseline communication really takes off. Ka-Ching, as the buzzword goes. But look to the American news anchor for proper base-line language, its pronunciation and correct usage, that also refreshes itself, it still says the same old thing. Food insecurity? Slum is a heavy word, and it perfectly encompasses all the negativity that poverty produces – bad health, bad education, bad family structure, bad living conditions including lack of healthy food, but also lacking heat in winter and coolling in summer, security in the highest crime neighborhoods. It’s February, 2024, and CNN has been using the term, “sticky” or “stickiness” that i first came acros as a term used by google analytics, the software that can show you the amount of viewer “stickiness” or ability of the site to attract repeat visits. Thus, the manufacture of buzzwords to describe the same old things, is a process that can be witnessed every day.
But, occasionally they stick, for a reason, they work. “Flash in the pan, stool pigeon or cool your heels, remain as great American lingo, when the buzzword rises to accepted and used slang. “Taking my talents to…” went from an egotistical declaration, when LeBron James announced his move out of Cleveland sports, to a tribute used in the mainstream, that can also be used by anyone, not just athletes.
Re-up. Now there’s a word with no buzz. It just works, and it comes fom the shortened military talk for reenlist from way back when.
The dumbest buzz word yet, I’ve heard, is DT’s retruth on his social media, another oxymoron, similar to truth social, more self-contradicting buzzwords, since it begins with History’s greatestElection liar. The lie retruthed is still a lie reflecting honestly the extreme pretzel logic required to join someone like Trump by the likes of Vance or Musk. Let’s reup on that lie spoken as if it were true.
This isn’t picking on Trump, he loves the exposure and publicity, but, there are buzzwords, particularly the ones you never hear anymore, that are completely of the times, often with an economic incentive. Today 25% of all the electricity produced in Virginia goes to data centers. No wonder Bill Gates, long ago, wanted to re-introduce small nuclear reactors to America. That’s nothing compared to what the demands of AI will produce along with bitcoin mining. That’s why dead trees can’t work, and, even though it was a lie from the get-go, in order to convince people of the inborn goodness of everything tech in a matter of two words.
You decide which of today’s buzzwords deserves a permanent place in widespread discourse.
To your point
Tone deaf
Optics
Laser-focused
Existential
Weaponize
Pivot
Gray matter
No brainer
Squishy
Cross the pond
Gin up
Ecosystem
Across the pond
Journey
They are in a better place
They died doing what they loved.
A lot to unpack
Skin in the game
Baby bump
Right-sized
Calculus
Calcification
On my plate
Low hanging fruit
Engaged
Premiumization
Hybridization
Granularity
At the end of the day
Baited breath
Hot mess
Sucks up all the oxygen
Dial it back
Level playing field
Win-win
Cha-Ching
Poppin’
Game-changer
Redemption of our narrative
Moving forward
Reshore
Upskill
Onshoring
The brand
Backfill
Blowback
Push back
Weaponize
Performative wokeness
Lean in
Unhinged
Performative bigotry
Guardrails
Lanes
Recuse
Boots on the ground
All in
Outlier
Baked in
Any death, is one death too many
Game changer
Pre-revenue
Retruth
Narrative
Optics
Sustainability
Scale
Toolkit
Bucket list
Vacay
Fam
Revenge travel
Out of your lane
PZ easy
Holy moly
Kit and caboodle
My north star
Community
Keeps me up at night
Reach out
Bad in
Thick skin
Fully bald
Down there
Super
Awesome
Epic
Empowerment
G.H.O.A.T.
Weaponize
Disruption
Sketchy
Racist infrastructure
Environmental racism
Dead trees
Food desert
Food insecurity
Spoiler alert
Geography of racism
You got this
You own this
You killed it
Own it
Walk back
Baby bump
Wrap your head around it
New normal
We’re all in this together
Not so much
Eponymous
Overlooked no more
Bad actor
Spoiler alert
Toxic masculinity
Moving forward
Journey
Think oiutside the box
Checked all the boxes
Suck up all the oxygen
Change the calculus
Age is just a number
Any death is one death to many
Having a moment
Uh ha moment
Best version of yourself
Empowerment
Your best self
Self-care
Metastasize
It’s in our DNA
That’s so you
People of color
That being said
Check all the boxes
New normal
It’s a lot to unpack
At the end of the day
Wrap my head around it
Rabbit hole
Kudos
Bropropriate
Cancel culture
Clicktivism
Conscious capitalism
Cultural appropriation
Fast fashion
Fexitarianism
Gaslight
Gender binary
Greenwash
Internalised misogyny
intersectionality
Mansplain
Plant-based
Toxic masculinity
Trigger warning
With the arrival of wokeness, the phenomenon of buzzwords has risen to a pinnacle of conceit with its words-as-hypostasis and its reification, amounting to priggish elitism in place of sense or the real, like the buzzwords that stick because they work, and, thus, make sense.
Stuart Heritage has nailed the phenomenon with his contemporary glossary of the Woke, and, below, is a nice list of buzzwords with sarcastic commentary, which, of course, is a violation according to the Woke.:
- Academia: the Wuhan Lab of lethal ideas.
- Adulting: washing your dirty clothes instead of just ordering new clothes on Amazon.
- Affirmative Action: systemic racism for profit.
- Allyship: the more leisurely alternative to the Allyplane.
- Anti-racism: systemic racism for profit.
- Bae: just one letter shy of a real babe.
- Binary: decidedly undecided.
- BIPOC: gay or lesbian POC.
- Birthing person: how mostly over-educated, white (il)liberal women allow a few men to objectify all women.
- Black Lives Matter: the insistence that black lives matter despite all proof to the contrary.
- Cancel culture: what the Left claims doesn’t exist until it happens to them.
- Call-out culture: when your friends stand outside your window after school and scream for you to come out and play, then call you a wuss when your mom won’t let you.
- Cis-normative: mangled attempt to simplify not-LGBTTQQIAAP.
- Consensual non-monogamy: just wait till your wife finds out!
- Critical Race Theory: systemic racism for profit.
- Cultural appropriation: unauthorized flattery.
- Democracy: what the ruling elite must first destroy in order to save.
- DIE: the imperative delivered by the Diversity, Inclusion and Equity industry to the Bill of Rights.
- Diversity: where everyone looks different but thinks the same.
- Education: indoctrination.
- Entitlements: table scraps left over after the ruling elite gorge themselves.
- Femtech: niche products relentlessly marketed to more than 50% percent of the population.
- Follow the science: a religious call to action invoked when actual science refuses to cooperate.
- Free speech: only if you agree with me.
- Gender affirming care: gentler, kinder castration.
- Gender fluid: what your gender studies professor spits up when she chokes on her own pronouns.
- Great Reset: what you get when you press Hillary Clinton’s big red reset button.
- Green New Deal: what results when you combine the Yellow and Blue New Deals.
- Identity politics…
- when applied to race: genetic determinism.
- when applied to gender: genetic indeterminism.
- Implicit bias: bias no one knows they have until a racist is paid to tell them they have it.
- Inclusive: all expenses paid (sorry, couldn’t resist the temptation).
- Indoctrination: education.
- Information: the weapon most preferred and deployed by the ruling elite in the class war against freedom; more specifically…
- (Dis)information: what the ruling elite don’t want you to know.
- (Mis)information: what the ruling elite want you to know
- (Mal)information: what the ruling elite require you to know.
- Intersectionality: where everyone comes together — whether they like it or not —but no one wants to live.
- Journalist: the spy who came in from the cold.
- Justice: a common good that requires a modifier to convert it into a common evil. For instance…
- Green justice: class warfare posing as mob justice reimagined.
- Racial justice: class warfare posing as mob justice reimagined.
- Social justice: class warfare posing as mob justice reimagined.
- Trans-justice: class warfare posing as mob justice reimagined.
- LatinX: how no Hispanic person wants to be described.
- LGBTQ-inclusive: a modifier invoked only when you need to exclude everything else.
- LGBTTQQIAAP+: mangled attempt to define non-cis-normative.
- Marginalization: when margin notes become the main story.
- Micro-aggression: too small to see but powerful enough to tyrannize all of academia, most Fortune 100 corporations and the entire Democratic Party.
- Minor-attracted person: pedophile.
- Misgender: who sits next to Mr. Gender?
- Mostly peaceful: exceedingly violent.
- Non-binary: everything else.
- Pansexual: someone with the hindquarters, legs, and horns of a goat — and an Ivy League diploma.
- Period Dignity Officer: making a bloody mess out of everything.
- Pronoun: a formerly amateur noun.
- Recession: a dent on the rear bumper of an EV.
- Reimagine: what ideologues do when they want to destroy something.
- Religion: politicized science.
- Safe space: where the elite children of elite parents go to avoid free speech for only $80,000 a year.
- Science: politicized religion.
- Systemic racism: the DNA of the Democratic Party.
- Transformative: massive systemic modification designed to satisfy only the smallest statistical constituency.
- Transitioning: the process of being red-pilled after the mugging.
- Transgender: the best reason to buy a whole new wardrobe.
- Transphobia: fear of the trans mob.
- Trigger warning: what mostly peaceful protesters issue right before they pull the trigger.
- Two-spirit: one spirit plus one spirit.
- Virtue signal: making a left turn into heavy traffic sound like a good idea.
- White fragility: systemic racism for profit.
- White privilege: character flaw that infects mostly over-educated, elite white (il)liberals when they try to convert non-racist working class whites into racist working class whites.
- White rage: what elite white (il)liberals and five-star generals are full of when they describe working class whites.
- White supremacy: what remains when the last black man has no rhythm and can’t jump.
- Wokeness: the missionary religion of classism preached by mostly white, mostly affluent, mostly self-loathing (il)liberal secularists.
Do you know how, what’s trending, comes across as something much grander than what it is, I guess, due to its noise and meaninglessness? The self-aggrandizing with celebrity only makes it worse in the realm of followers under the influence, communicating in a way that, by definition, is noise and chatter, whose only problem is, that it thinks its something else.
twittering noun (PERSON)
the act of talking quickly and nervously, saying things of very little importance or interest, or something that is said in this way:
The chief executive bursts into the room and the twittering stops.
I’ll just ignore his ridiculous twitterings about me.
In our circus of self-interest, and, with the extreme rise of performance art as activism and politics, along with more and more education, the replacement of action by words and performances, is through the roof, so much so, I cannot keep up with the cascade of new words and phrases that describe and defines the same old thing, from the continual renewing of language to reflect the times. An example would be the grammar wars, where pronouns become political points, triggers and comebacks – if a person is “non-binary” then a new language is made for them.
Starving and impovershed is now food insecurity reflecting our state of over-education, living closer to words and their hopes, than truth and what’s plain, real. Food insecurity? Think about it. I find starving, broke, hungry for healthy foods and poverty as more to theb point, not proving how educated and clever your words can be.
I actually live it and don’t want to come up with, yet, new words for it, because I don’t need them, you’ve alienated folks who might be on your side, with your trendiness, and with clever phrases and words, which, again, describe mostly the same old things, with new phrases and words, for the latest generations, but nothing is really accomplished, except, maybe, when you get out here, see what is, and then try to do your thing
In order to make the buzzword Hall of Fame the word or term has to last and become part of the normal lexicon. “Significant other” which, 50 or 60 years ago, you only heard in French intellectual circles, certainly trickled into the larger population and became a standard. By the 1990s I would hear homeless people using the word. More recently baby bump has, unfortunately, established itself, even becoming a fashion genre brought to its more extreme conclusions by Robyn Fenty. Even a simple adjective – very – has been largely replaced by “super” in a world that America has put on steroids.
But there is no group more defined by their buzzwords than the Woke. But buzzwords that stick, like good-to-go or hit you off, work great as language because it works by signifying nothing outside itself, let alone virtue-signaling, and, they just plain, work.
Meantime, enjoy “your hair-growth journey” It’s just that it ain’t my idea of a journey, but a vanity trip, and, like “awesome” is simply the aggrandizing of the trivial and the measley amongst mass society, instead of simply working as pure usage, as accepted by the masses.
