Alt Op #38 Buzzes and bites

This time I’d like to talk about buzzwords and sound bites.

First let me give you a definition of these two words. Buzzword means: a fashionable word or concept, often associated with a particular group of people and not understood by outsiders (informal)
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

Sound bite, on the other hand, means : brief broadcast remark: a very short comment or phrase intended or suitable for broadcasting in a news program, especially one by a politician. Their use is often regarded as demonstrating superficiality and glibness.
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2004 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

There is even a game called buzzword bingo that can be played when you know you will be sitting through a boring meeting or speech likely to be loaded with the things. You simply make up a bingo card before the meeting with a list of the most likely buzzwords the speaker will use and then pass it out to your friends. A number of words used for a ‘bingo’ is decided on and when you are able to check of that number of words on your card you either yell ‘bingo’ or, if you just don’t want to get in trouble then you raise your hand and ask a question, dealing with the subject, that has the word bingo in it somewhere.

Sounds like something we should all do when listening to either the news or political speeches. It might make it harder for them to lead us blindly about with these kinds of words.

The problem is that while these words may have once actually carried a definite meaning, buzzwords especially as they are usually taken from a technical jargon of some kind or other, that meaning has usually been lost or diluted when it becomes popularly used. “Green” for instance. Once it was just a color. Then it became a movement. Then it became a descriptive for a special form of whatever other word it was tacked onto as a descriptive. We now have “green power”, “green fuels”, “green economy”, and any number of other “green” things. It has become as bad as the word “lite” or “light” and just as misleading or, in this case; fattening!

Sound bites are just as bad. We all think we know what they mean. But these short groups of words that may or may not stir the soul one way or the other, have been taken completely out of context and used that way so often I doubt some of us even know what they once really meant.

One that bothers me, that I have heard recently is “Class War.” It was being used to refer to the idea, a splendid one in my opinion, that maybe; just maybe, those who have scads of money should pay the same tax rate as everyone else. Not MORE than everyone else, just the SAME as everyone else.

Now I’m not against people who have a lot of money. I’d really like to be one someday. I’d have no problem paying taxes on what I earned then, just as I have none paying what I owe now. How dose that make the very idea the opening shot of a “class war?”