You hear all kinds of new words being thrown around these days, but where do they come from and why are people using buzzwords?
1. Relevancy – Most buzzwords become hip for the simple reason that they are relevant to the times. Remember Y2K? Throw a buzzword into ANY or EVERY conversation you have and nobody will argue it. People will remember it and use it themselves.
2. Contagiousness - Buzzwords are fun to use, they’re easy to say, and often spread like wildfire. Buzzwords can be heard everywhere these days- in the news, on TV, on the internet, and more recently from Advertisements. Politicians drop buzzwords on the public too; in 2008 we heard about to avoid pork-barrel spending, or earmarks.
3. Meaning – New words give new thought, which is the whole idea behind using them. In 2008 it was all about going “green“, and how we can reduce our carbon-footprint, and become more eco-friendly. The words are out there for anyone to use; they help corral thought and give direction.
Thought-provoking buzzwords can come from just about anywhere these days. Companies like Budweiser that invest heavily in market research can afford to make up words. Just look at the new drinkabilty ads for Bud Light.
Now, what are your favorite buzzwords?
2 responses so far ↓
malachijung // March 19, 2009 at 6:51 am |
i hate buzzwords. All of a sudden when one springs up, people start pretending like they know something that’s current and on the cutting edge of information because they took the time to read a paragraph or two of their chosen sources of propaganda. Buzzwords have always been around, but god damnit, hasn’t the system fine tuned itself to shoot that shit straight into the forefronts of our minds. I mean, if they wanted us to think a certain thing, they just run it through the press, and it becomes a “thing”. Fuck these “things” most the time. I could give a fuck less about Sarah Palin. Give me the real news! I want CNN reporting about FEMA camps, and the future of RFID chips. They distract us with these “things”, these buzzwords, and program us to only seek out interest in things that they want us to investigate in, programming these pre conceived opinions every which away that offers false solutions to broken paradigms . Tell me about super computers that sift through these blogs and tags anything suspicious.
fuck it.
i won’t go down without a blog!
for some reason i conclude with an excerpt of the Ginsberg “howl”
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open
their skulls and ate up their brains and imagi-
nation?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unob
tainable dollars! Children screaming under the
stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men
weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the
loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy
judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the
crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of
sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment!
Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stun-
ned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose
blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers
are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a canni-
bal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking
tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows!
Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long
streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose fac-
tories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose
smokestacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch
whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch
whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch
whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen!
Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream
Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in
Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom
I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch
who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy!
Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch!
Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs!
skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic
industries! spectral nations! invincible mad
houses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pave-
ments, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to
Heaven which exists and is everywhere about
us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies!
gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole
boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions!
gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! De-
spairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides!
Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on
the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the
wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell!
They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving!
carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the
street!
David Merfield // April 14, 2009 at 12:37 am |
Don’t you just hate buzzwords; overused peices of nothing.
My favorite: recession.