It’s the sheer unrelenting uninventiveness of jargon that gets me.
The way a new word or phrase sweeps through society like a tsunami or, to use an example, “goes viral.”
A closer examination of these bits of jargon reveals metaphors that are born one day and, like flies, die that same day, as dead metaphors, though they live on and are used.
So, then, “going viral.”
A YouTube post can go viral when everyone clicks on the Internet site.
A phrase itself, like “going viral,” can go viral when everyone, suddenly, starts seeing it in print. (Do we read print anymore? Print not produced by texting?)
Yes, the metaphor, originally striking and original, dies almost immediately, becomes a dead metaphor, for few people recognize it any more as a metaphor, a simile or comparison. It’s just words, dead words, dead flies, detritus that piles up and connects us to each other in a kind of disease or diseased network.
If a bit of language, or a video, goes viral, isn’t it by definition virulent? Doesn’t it, like a virus, have the power to spread rapidly — but also to infect?
If we are infected by this virus, then aren’t we too sick?
And if we use the phrase or video, aren’t we spreading the disease?
We don’t have to be high priests of language, purists, “gloomy grammarian in … golden gowns” (thanks, Wallace Stevens), to realize that unconscious use of language makes us susceptible to all sorts of diseases. We spread the germs. We don’t realize we’re ailing. We don’t realize we’re being overtaken by these germs, even as we do their bidding, willy-nilly, the way an HIV-positive person may succumb to the virus.
If we must go viral, can we develop some consciousness of our predicament?
So that we don’t spread the jargon, the cliches, the disease indiscriminately?
(For a good example of viral hype, see BuzzFeed, the kind of contemptible tripe we’re all too used to in the infotainment sphere. For a quick consideration of how jargon corrupts, see “What Is Your Gibberish Component?”)
