Catch This

Ron Rosenbaum's June 27th Slate article, "Notes on Catch: Which catchphrases should be "thrown under the bus," caught my eye.

He discusses a phenomenon he calls "catch," or "the way our language has become increasingly dominated by rapidly cycling catchphrases."

Look how long it took "jump the shark" to jump the shark. But "under the bus"—as in, "throwing someone under the bus"—got old from overuse in a matter of weeks.

He lists the stages of a catchphrase:

There's Stage 1, when you first hear a phrase and take pleasure in its imaginative use of language on the literal and metaphorical level...

...Then there's Stage 2, when you use it to establish "street cred" (time to throw "street cred" under the catchphrase bus?) or convey a sense of being au courant.

Then there's Stage 3, when the user acknowledges a phrase's over-ness and tries to extract some final mileage out of it by gently mocking it, usually by using ironic quotes, or adding "as they say" to the end.

Finally, there's Stage 4: terminal obsolence, dead phrase walking. Take "at the end of the day." It kind of stuns me whenever I find someone still saying "at the end of the day" with a straight face. What are they, stuck on stupid, as they say?

And finishes with a list of phrases he's "on the bubble about" (another catchprase?).

• stay classy


• up in your grill


• overshare


• tell us something we don't know


• man up


• go-to


• drinking the Kool-Aid


• mad props

For what it's worth, the piece reminded me a little bit of my January post on the term "jump the shark."