May 30, 2012

"Epic Mitt Romney App Gaffe Goes Viral Online" is maybe the worst sentence I've ever read. It is fiendishly efficient in its horribleness, like every word was specially crafted in a laboratory by a sadistic linguistic scientist for the express purpose of irritating me in as few characters as possible. I thought I'd try to take it apart word by word and explore just why I find it so heinous.

Epic - "Epic" is just this meaningless overused superlative that seriously irritates the hell out of me to the point that I cringe even when it's used correctly (that is, as a noun)

Mitt Romney - Look, I don't like the guy, but just seeing his name in a certain context conjures up an image of some super-smug guy with a "FAUX NEWS" coffee mug forwarding this dumb article about some low-level intern misspelling "America" to his like-minded friends as further evidence that Mitt Romney is a hopelessly uncool square who just doesn't "get" things like Twitter and iPhone the way Obama does

App - As a non-smartphone-haver I find most anything having to do with apps (like that Siri tumblr) kind of obnoxious and insular

Mitt Romney App - An abhorrent phrase in its own right. The realization candidates for office now have to make their own meme-generating apps, that on some infinitesimal level among a hopefully small minority of voters the election will be decided by Which Side Has The Better Memes, is horrifying

Gaffe - I think on some level the word "gaffe" is more insidious than "FAIL" because it has the veneer of classiness. You would never see "Epic Fail" on the front page of the New York Times, but you might see "gaffe," even though an article about how a politician said a word wrong is just as worthless as an I Can Has Cheezburger? slideshow of Massive Fails

Goes Viral - In other words some hack journalist saw a hashtag on Twitter and quickly whipped up a non-story to cash in on the virility

Online - Isn't this just kind of superfluous? It's almost always used as a kind of distancing qualifier, like "ha ha look what those goofballs in cyberspace did this time," a cynical wink to let the audience know the writer knows that this stuff is all utterly meaningless, but that's not going to stop them from writing a bunch of paragraphs about it and wasting everybody's time.

Yeah I know I'm overthinking these things but I don't care