Ron Rosenbaum over at Slate, has been chronicling catchphrases for a while, and now at the dawn of 2010, he picks the catchphrase of the decade, and also does away with the awful ones by “throwing them under the bus.”
For example, who doesn’t hate “it is what it is”? Rosenbaum refers to this type of catchphrase as BSBS (Buddhist-sounding bullshit.) Rosenbaum may want to call time’s up on phrases that have had more than their allotted fifteen minutes of fame, but he also shows affection for phrases such as “throw up a little in my mouth”.
He points out that catchphrases, “at the end of the day,” should be used to “tell us something we don’t know.” They’re not just so we can inflate ourselves by proclaiming “That’s how I roll; I roll deep.” (Oh god, I almost just threw up a little in my mouth typing that.) But it’s not all fun and games, as catchphrases can pack a serious political punch:
It’s not a trivial subject. In domestic politics, for instance, we had the misbegotten political framing device public option, which, in masking a complex hidden agenda, baffled even potential supporters.
[…]
Just how much political and social power can be packed into one- two- or three-word phrases? A recent 60 Minutes/Vanity Fair poll reported that two-thirds of Americans still didn’t understand what the “public option” was. Who knows whether the whole history of the health care debate would be different if proponents had come up with a phrase that people could not only understand but rally around.
[…]the whole phenomenon is worth thinking about more closely, because of the way catchphrases can become—through clever compression that verges on, or amounts to, distortion—political weapons. And the way the rapid cycling of catchphrases can confuse what is really being said or meant, obscure what stage, what flavor of irony is being employed.
