Week Four: WTF is a paradigm?!

This one makes me smile.

I remember a moment early in freshman year when suddenly everything I read had either "paradigm" or "paradigm shift" in it. I thought it was pronounced "paradigim," and strongly suspected it of being one of those snooty phrases that makes you sound smarter than everyone else in the room but doesn't actually mean anything you couldn't have said with words that most people use. Like "trails and tribulations," or "sea change."

I felt vindicated recently to learn that "paradigm shift" is actually on a list of overused phrases that copyeditors-in-training are told to watch out for. So ha.

Anyway, I'm thinking of doing a dictionary "definition" that actually tells a very short story of some kind. This is the plan, but we shall see...

Comments

[Samantha]

I had the same exact experience my freshman year at Emerson! I wasn't even in a writing program. I was hyper-aware of that word and phrase, and the fact that everyone was so concerned with "aesthetics".