Ruminations on a cold morning

App - app app app - app app! No, it's not the AFLAC duck, or a farmyard full of turkeys a week before Thanksgiving. It's not your neighbor's nasty little Lhasa Apso, it's the sound of consumers quacking away in consumer-speak in the American night. The malls are full of it, the AT&T and Verizon stores should hand out earplugs because of it --APP APP APP! Getcher apps here -- apps! Apps, apps.

"To most people, an "app" is something you download on your smartphone to help you do a specific task."

says CNN.com this morning. I guess most people now means airheaded and hysterically eager to buy consumers between the ages of 13 and 24. Those are the people most retailers are interested in and the most likely to speak the language of consumerism, invented to make it difficult to speak without advertising a product or concept thereby.

So what happens when you want to apply for something? Do you app on some sunscreen at the beach? So what ever happened to "application" in the sense of software designed to perform some function? I guess it got teenagerized into a form more easily entered on a telephone keypad derived from the dial phones that began to go out of fashion around 1960. Most people indeed. So I guess for the newspeak speaker it's now silly to talk of developing computer applications and ridiculous all the more if we shorten it to "app." To me it's all something that springs most rhymingly to mind.

Yeah, yeah, it's more "evolution" only it's not - it's intelligent design because language now is a consumer product which changes to suit corporate sales, not our communications needs. That's why we have "realtor" for real estate broker, why they sell "homes" and not houses or apartments, why we have "mobile estates" rather than trailers and why health is now "wellness." It's why we have pre-owned cars on the used car lots, patriot acts and worse.

Of course it's not all bad. We now have "tweet" which is easier to type than "mind-numbing and narcissistic banality" although "blog" works almost as well there; which brings me to the point at which I'd better rest my case.