There is a smart-alek article, “Tipping point cliché has tipped”, that hit the wires on July 30, 2003 that I caught in the surprisingly good International Herald Tribune. Perhaps I now think it is good because it is mostly NYT and I’m resigned to playing “find the rest of the story”.
In any case the story was about how the concept of the tipping point has itself tipped. Certainly now that it has been used by Donald Rumsfeld himself that would appear to be true.
The smart-alek article (which I did enjoy) ended with the question,
The difficulty in finding a synonym demonstrates how the Grodzins coinage met a semantic need. But disdainers of cliché must ask, What is it that the overuse of tipping point has reached?
This shows that the author is but a tourist in the land of pop-memetics. Anyone worth their salt knows that one would say that the tipping point has jumped the shark.
Posted by james at August 4, 2003 06:56 AM | TrackBack