Being a language nerd and a writer (… they CAN be different things!), the trends of language within popular culture capture my attention. Being, too, old enough to have actually said “like totally” unironically – and, indeed, to have known the term irony unburdened by 90s/2000s hipster baggage – I’ve seen some linguistic habits come and go. Val-speak, only a little overstated in the ancient Nicholas Cage outing, “Valley Girl”, was actually and honestly a “thing” – just a bit before “a thing” became a thing. Southern people once ate an evening meal we called supper. And the particular pronunciation my dad used for the word restaurant is long unheard except in memory.
Some trends within the English language do little more than irritate and engender speechifying and complaint. Corporate-speak is the shining example here, with people in the 80s “interfacing” (conversing) and developing their skill sets and so on, through into the odd tic I ran into at my previous employer, where every sentence began with the word, “So.” Question, statement – didn’t matter, there was a pervasive inability to commence any utterance without it.
Some, though, are not bad at all. Or, perhaps, they’re sad hipster jumpings-of-a-verbal-shark. You decide.
Over the past two years, I have noticed the increasing prominence of the verb,
to curate. Because this is a highly useful term, and hasn’t come across my desk in any memos, I’ve been happy to see its widening utility. It doesn’t seem to be thrown around improperly, and its unspoken limitation to museum collections never had any basis in any case – and it has a nice feel to it, the word curate. I like its spelling, its sound, its pronunciation, its slight, soft lilt bouncing between strong consonants.
It’s a perfectly cromulent word.
But recently it made it way into a commercial, in the form of a chubby, bearded, hipster bartender saying, “I like to really CURATE my herbs” as he makes a drink.
Now, we all know that the hipster beard had to be over once the wildly expensive realm of television commercials were using it widely, and we’re required to insert-meta-ironic-post-snark-viral superiority here, because a trend, once over, must be reviled, and publicly, or without the backlash who will know they are being punished for being out of step …
WAS THAT A SHARK WE JUST JUMPED?
Is the word curate now victim of the inevitable public flogging all the slobby youngsters who followed a trend just last year are on the tipping point of enduring, because it has now been associated with them? Has “curate” jumped the shark (a phrase, itself, both a tool of all backlash and simultaneously dismissed as having been overdone and missing important artistic points because it is reductive)?
Words absolutely go out of style. Some stay – some for centuries. Another fascinating study in the fashion of language is just how OLD some slang we think we invented really is (see also: every damn word Shakespeare ever wrote – the OED certainly does).
But many, many, many terms and manners of speaking are ephemeral. This is how Old English became Middle English became Tudor speech became American English, modern British English, pidgin, and a hundred thousand dialects. This is how sentimentalist contrarians like me choose to pronounse rest-runt like their dads did, despite never saying it that way for 40 years – or choose suddenly to
bring “supper” back, because it’s a word with a certain feel, a connection to literature we love, or just to be different.
When Teh Intarwebs was new, it was a big deal just figuring out how we were going to spell email (shall we hyphenate? shall we spell out the whole words, electronic mail?) and in 1999 (… and still …) figuring out what to call the first decade – and second – of the new millennium was the subject of ad nauseum discussion. When the automobile came along, it was much the same, with options from motor car to horseless carriage coming and going perhaps in a way that seemed almost as fast as the newfangled machines themselves. And we ended up with multiple solutions, around our various earthly “ponds” …
The older I get, the more aware I am – and glad I am – how deeply irrelevant my outrages are, especially where the English language is concerned. My ex husband (who graduated
magna cum laude in ENLGISH, as he spelt it when he told me about it via electronic mail back in the early aughts) and I get along better and better where grammar is concerned, as the years go by, and I find it almost bewilderingly pleasurable to find out how many rules I grew up on – or just decided on, in a stubborner state of youth – are dead-assed WRONG.
Or incorrect, if you simply must prefer. Heh.
The non-native prohibition on dangling prepositions imposed on us by Latin-writing monks. The which/that conundra so widespread most people don’t even compute they exist at all. Spelling itself.
I still hold to the fact that the word “hatred” exists, but have come to accept that the noun form of that word is going to be “hate” whether I like it or not … and, in fact, that the usage predates even the ancient century in which *I* was born. By a few more.
I won’t ever buy an INFINITI vehicle, because its name gives me hives (and I’m not a prestige-sucking-by-“exclusive”-brands kind of dilettante …).
I’ll hew, probably always, to standardized spellings – and even insist upon the apostrophe in Hallowe’en – but not because I believe there’s anything like a definitive “correct” way to render our language. Just because … I’m a heedless maniac in enough ways; linguistically, I gravitate to discipline, even if the discipline is arbitrary and even imaginary. As in religion, sometimes we just choose a set of rules. Humans like both to make them – and break them – and, oh sometimes, even to follow them. Sort of.
So … what do you think? Has “curate” jumped the shark, along with “jumped the shark” and ironic, slobby hipster boys with beards? Or will you use it proudly – for your herbs or museum collections or choices in dog food?
