Buzzword Watch

Maybe I'm only just noticing this. That's how it goes sometimes. I remember in my parents' house, we'd occasionally get infestations of flying ants, but you wouldn't notice the infestation all at once. You'd look at the floor, and see an ant. Then you'd move your gaze a few inches or so, and see two or three more. Then you'd see there were millions of them.

That's how it's been with my noticing that the word "narrative" has crept into the media and just spread like bunnies in Australia. Just now I was reading a Times story about the McCain candidacy that said "if campaigns are primarily about narratives ... " and I had to stop and mention this phenomenon. I only noticed it a month or two ago, but the word "narrative" now stands in for a host of other words: story, scenario, fantasy, myth, and so on.

What I suspect is that all these writer dudes heard a bunch of professor dudes talking about how knowledge is "socially constructed." Basically what this means is that a lot of what you and I know, we know because other people told it to us, and the other people could be devious or wrong. People make good livings tricking that idea out in lots of long, relatively meaningless words. They really do. And a lot of them will tell you that nothing really exists except in our minds. People pay perfectly good money to be told that often enough that they believe it.

Anyway, just wondering if other people are noticing this too. Personally I'm not so sure that any good purpose is served by calling all these different things "narratives." I'm not so sure about this socially constructed theory of knowledge, either. For a long time, nobody had ever seen Antarctica. But it was there all along. That's what I think, anyway.