I worked for years in a state agency field office servicing the public, and I became fascinated with how certain fashions bloomed overnight. Earrings are a good example: you looked up one day and saw an abundance of hideous doorknocker-sized geometric shapes with a bamboo motif-- leaf-patterns also proliferated in this manner. It was such a rapid and ubiquitous phenomenon that it seemed to be coordinated beyond the realm of chance.
Certain phrases also seem to transmit instantaneously to the masses-- facilitated, naturally, by mass media. “Role model” was lifted from the professional lexicon of sociology and bastardized into a synonym for “leader” or “mentor”; it wound up on everyone’s lips.
And “teachable moment” is the latest. I’d like to know whence it originated, the way one might like to know where HIV/AIDS originated. Wherever it came from, it spread like wildfire.
I don’t know why neo-buzzwords reflexively inspire disdain in me, but they do. Please use this query as a “teachable moment” and instruct me on its origin, and how it was released from confinement to pervade the universe of discourse!