The Professor
			8.29.05
	A Speculation on Metaphors in the Media       I am getting thoroughly tired of a phrase that I've been reading more and more of in recent months: "tamp down". It seems like everywhere I turn, there is some politician, commentator, or journalist using the phrase in reference to any number of objects. From tamping down the insurgency on Special Report with Brit Hume to tamping down our lust for big-screen televisions in Slate Magazine, our public brains have discovered a metaphor and driven it into the ground.       This bothers me for a few reasons. First, it's just kind of a stupid phrase that doesn't really describe what people wish it to. To tamp something down is to decrease its length along the y-axis and distribute it farther along the x-axis. You tamp sand. You tamp dirt. You tamp gravel. Hearing it used in other contexts, however, one gets the impression that to tamp something down is tantamount to removing it. And that is the wrong impression. One removes a bump in the sand by tamping the sand down.       But that's a small point. My bigger problem with the phrase is the speed with which it has proliferated. One axiom of sociolinguistic inquiry is that language change and language shift occurs most rapidly within "dense" populations, where "dense" can refer to any kind of frequent or regular contact. What the speedy spread of "tamp down" shows is that these guys are reading to and listening to one another a lot. They're picking up on the latest metaphoric trends, just like the dorky kids on the playground mimic the cool kids, and they're making them their own in their work.       And I don't want to suggest that there's necessarily anything wrong with reading the work of others in the popular media. Far from it. But to consider that these folks spend much of their time on television or writing regularly for their respective publications, and that they must be reading a crapload from the pop media if they're picking up one another's cool-kid talk, and that they probably spend a great deal of time moving and shaking (as such people are wont to do) -- one wonders how much of what we read is the intellectual product of an incestuous media that fucks its own members for edification.       My point: If those who make the argument that the media is monolithic are looking for ammunition, look for language. Don't look for content, because there's enough obfuscation there to convince people that there are actual differences of opinion. Don't look for more channels, because they're likely to be owned by the same media corporation. Look for the words that people are using, and you might begin to see that there's quite the circle-jerk going on.
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