When Susan Sontag wrote “Notes on ‘Camp’ ” back in 1964, she was foregrounding—to use a current catchphrase—something familiar but not yet defined.
“Many things in the world have not been named,” her famous essay began, “and many things even if they have been named, have never been described. One of these is the sensibility—unmistakably modern, a variant of sophistication but hardly identical with it—that goes by the cult name of ‘Camp.’ “
I would choose nearly identical words to describe the phenomenon, the linguistic sensibility, that I’d name “catch”: the way our language has become increasingly dominated by rapidly cycling catchphrases. Rapidly cycling because in blogospheric time, they speed from clever witticism to tired cliché in the virtual blink of an eye.
more from Slate here.