A small rant, but one that has been growing on me for the past few months.
It all started with Dennis Kucinich. He started the whole thing saying that, under a Kucinich administration , there would be a “sea change” in foreign policy, or in the cultural understanding of peace, or whatever. Mind you, I had never, in my two decades of life, ever heard of this phrase previous to Kucinich.
Now, all of a sudden, everyone is using this phrase. Howard Dean has used it. Hillary Clinton has used it. When I watched CSPAN this afternoon, even the Mars Exploration Rover Project Manager, Peter Theisinger, used the phrase.
Call me strange, but I really don’t understand these word usage fads. It happened about two years ago with “ilk,” which has thankfully died out.
Oh well. I don’t get it. It’s just something that grates on my nerves once in a while.
Of his bones are coral made: / Those are pearls that were his eyes: / Nothing of him that doth fade, / But doth suffer a sea change.
It’s Shakespeare’s fault. He knew the phrase would lie dormant for some four hundred years before launching itself into public consciousness. Really, it’s the original sleeper agent.
I suspect when this happens the word or phrase isn’t necessarily being used more, but we notice it once for some reason then it becomes more noticable. Sort of like when you learn the definition of a new word and then see it all over the place.
“Ilk” is from Old English, which means it has been around for approximately 2,000 years. It was incredibly common in Middle English and Early Modern English, but in Present Day English it has come to bestow a negative connotation on the thing/person being referred to, and so is used less (the exception, of course, being evil politicians who wish us to believe that the foreign hamsters of the world are out to get us with weapons of mass destruction!)
And like the last thing I read before I went to sleep last night was a stream-of-consciousness section in Robert Anton Wilson’s Schrodinger’s Cat trilogy in which a character wonders…
What is particularly grating to me isn’t the gratuitous use of the term “sea change,” but it’s misuse to mean a large change or reversal over a relatively short time, when it actually implies a very, very slow process.
I believe it has to do with the odd phenomenon that you’re at the beach, you’ve been in the water, and later while on the boardwalk, you reach into the pocket of your trunks because you know you had a dollar in there, but now find only 63¢. Ducks and runs for cover
