Zeitgeist stories wanted

[BurtWorm]

Was there ever a time when you thought you had originated a phrase or an idea of some kind only to find that that very phrase or idea had become part of the cultural landscape somehow while you weren't even looking? And you thought to yourself, wow, did someone overhear me say this and it caught on like wildfire somehow? But of course it's just that you were plugged into the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times, for you non-Hegelians).

My example is the day Bush came here to NY to speak at the UN and bang the drum for the Iraq war in September 2002. The bastid had been talking already about the necessity of "regime change" in Iraq. That was the catchphrase the bastid was pushing that fall. I took the morning off so I could be at the demonstration before going to work. I didn't have time or material to make a sign, but as I said to my wife that if I could have made a sign it would have said, "Regime Change Begins at Home!" And she laughed, and I laughed, and we laughed and laughed...

Well, sir, next thing I know, at the first big A.N.S.W.E.R. demonstration in Washington at the end of October, there was that very phrase, already a slogan on T-shirts and bumper stickers and home-made signs. And I was like, did someone overhear me say that at the UN demo in September? :wtf:

So what's your Zeitgeist moment?

[patrice]

1. I've always been a word collector.

I became interested in "meta-", along with a bunch of other people at approximately the same time; also true for words with other pre-fixes and also individual words, such as "paradigm", which I became interested in from reading Thomas R. Kuhn's "The Structure of Scientific 'Revolutions'", in which Kuhn describes paradigm shift, i.e. scientific revolution, from the perspective of a science historian.

[latebloomer]

2. maybe it's a collective unconscious phenomenon

My husband's always thinking of inventions, and then finds out they've already been done.

[Stop_the_War]

3. What does "Zeitgeist" mean?

[BurtWorm]

4. Literally it means Spirit of the Times

and refers to the pulse or beat of a culture at the moment. Like say in 1965 a whole bunch of young men started letting their hair grow longer than the culture was used to. You might say it was the spirit of the times for hair on men to get longer.

[GoddessOfGuinness]

5. "bummeronies"

I started saying this back in the mid 1970's, when "That's a bummer, man" or just plain "bummers" was the norm. I wanted to spice it up a bit, so I invented "bummeronies".

At least, I thought I did.