Understanding the news these days is quite a conundrum, what with all the new lexicons…err, special vocabulary words…buzzing around.
While the expansion of one’s vocabulary is certainly laudable, I can’t always follow the news even though I sometimes write the stuff myself! It’s as if the media has a Pandora’s Box that some eager young reporter opens a couple times a year to release new buzzwords.
The words take off into newsprint and onto airwaves until they are worn into stingerless clichés. Then, the box is reopened, and the next little beasts appear!
Readers are expected to decipher words such as phish, metrosexual, dataveillance and annoyicon. They have to listen to phrases such as “hunker down,” “Let’s Roll!” and “Red State, Blue State” over and over and over.
Take that word in the first paragraph—conundrum. It means “a riddle whose answer is a pun” or “any puzzling problem.” Until the past few years, I had never heard of it. But just look and listen. It’s everywhere.
So for a while now, I’ve been collecting buzzwords – the witty, the trite, the redundant, the revived -- creating a sort of dictionary for the media-vocabulary challenged. Following is a portion of that list.
HUNKER DOWN – Popularized during the unprecedented 2005 hurricane season, hunker down is the act of getting prepared and hanging tough, especially recommended during a tornado warning. But until recently, I thought it was just one of those southern, redneck expressions that Yankees would laugh at if you actually used it. So, hearing the “sophisticated” mainstream media (MSM) talk about folks hunkering down amazed me. Even Weather Channel meteorologists, CNN reporters and Geraldo found a safe place to “hunker down” when they weren’t getting blown around.
CONTRA LANES – This one is brand new, but it is sure to catch on if weather pattern predictions come true. And it has nothing to with the Reagan Administration’s Iran-Contra affair. Contra lanes is another hurricane protégé that reporters use to describe the act of turning interstate lanes into one-way traffic so evacuees can evacuate faster. Example: “When a Cat 5 hurricane is heading for the Gulf Coast, Alabama knows how to handle contra lanes effectively, but Texas and Louisiana are still learning.”
METROSEXUAL – This word describes a fashion-conscious, heterosexual male. Some extremely right-wing columnists have indicted them as “girly men.” Metrosexual (the word) actually won the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year for 2003.
GOVERNATOR – Easy! That’s California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, formerly The Terminator.
BLOG – What I’m doing right now – creating a weblog or blog, a website of news, comments, events and links, as in “The log on my blog is in a bog.”
ANNOYICON – Everybody who watches TV has probably been annoyed by an annoyicon. It’s a logo in the bottom corner of a television screen. Why do they do that anyway?!
DATAVEILLANCE – A real techy word here! That’s surveillance using computer data. Sounds Big Brotherish!
SECOND-HAND SPEECH – Not the traditional game of Gossip we played as children! Nevertheless, we hear it all the time and everywhere – grocery stores, restaurants, WalMart, on the sidewalk, in the office, at home – it’s an overheard cell-phone conversation – could also be termed a type of tele-dataveillance that can be a real annoyicon!
FLORIDATE – This word got a “most unnecessary award” and means to “spoil the orderliness of an election” as in the 2000 presidential election, which required a Supreme Court ruling. It also earned Florida a revival of the word chad.
MULTISLACKING—Don’t most of us do this? Play at the computer when one should be working? Hey, I’m multislacking right now!
VENUE—This word popped up on major networks with the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Now, every Olympics and events of significance have venues. Previously, the only venue I was acquainted with was a change of venue when excess publicity meant a defendant could not get a fair trial in a certain location. However the word sharks want to define it, we put venue to work at my house. Rather than chores, we have venues – dishwashing venues, vacuuming venues, trash-emptying venues…and so on until we finally get closure on this “keeping the house clean for human habitation thing,” which brings us to our next vocabulary word!
CLOSURE – Most every subject mentioned into today’s media is subject to closure. The word means “to finish” as in the sentence, “Al Gore took a really, really long time to experience closure in Florida’s 2000 presidential election.” Another example: “Some Southerners have not yet experienced closure following the War of Northern Aggression.”
And with that, I think I’m gonna hunker down, stop multislacking and finish this blog so this column can experience closure.
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