Curate this, you unsustainably scaleable son of a meme!

This is what a "brand" used to be, before it became a euphemism
for a zillion other things. It is not only scaleable, but it can be
 completely artisinal, and it has sustainable durability.
This photograph is from the well-curated collection
of Google images.

Give me a break on jargon already, will somebody?

The way it’s been working is, somebody takes a perfectly normal word that has a normal meaning, and applies it to something ridiculous. Before you know it, the very sound of the word is ridiculous.

Take "curate." Used to be that the only people who did curating worked in museums, where they’d put together an art exhibition and write a bit of text on the walls explaining why some paintings by Van Gogh were chosen to be in the same room with some paintings by Degas. Or why this swimming thing is a dinosaur and a member of the same family as this huge plodding critter and the goofy one with the oversized wings.

But recently, somebody got a little pretentious, and now the word curate is spreading Pretention Fever. Every damn thing on the planet that wants to sound upscale, or sophisticated is getting curated, from shoes to heirloom tomatoes, and other heirloom tomatoes, and still other heirloom tomatoes.

"Heirloom tomatoes" is another descriptor of the moment that’s buzzing in my bonnet. I can understand beefsteak tomatoes, because they're big and beefy and you can slice them and serve the slices with tasty stuff on them such as basil and mozzarella cheese. I can understand grape and cherry tomatoes because they’re bite size and convenient to throw into salads. But what’s with “heirloom tomatoes?” As best I can figure, they are not heirlooms the way your great-great-great grandfather's chamber pot is an heirloom. No, "heirloom" tomatoes are ordinary tomatoes of any old size so long as they’re either misshapen or their color is off. And why are people "curating" them instead of just picking them?

"Scaleable" is another big buzzing hornet in my outhouse. I think when you call something "scaleable" it means that you can expand it, such as “In case there’s any demand for these things, we can have fifty new portapotties on the streets by Wednesday because the scaleability of this business is limited only by the limitless human urge to eliminate.”  That sounds a lot more impressive during an elevator pitch, I suppose, than saying, “our business can grow because people gotta go.”

"Artisinal"  should buzz off, too. Artisans used to be people like goldsmiths and woodcarvers who made beautiful things that lasted forever, and that you could go see whenever some museum director got around to curating them. Then the word spread, like mold in a cheese cellar, to the cheese business. People starting using artisinal to distinguish runny cheese from American cheese, and in the beer business to distinguish any beer they made in their garage from Budweiser and Miller Light. Or is it Miller "Lite?" Anway, lately, I’ve been noticing that every crappy ham and cheese sandwich in corner lunch and deli dives in Manhattan is artisinal, even though the cheese and ham and bread that they’re made of isn’t. What’s next, artisinal sewage?

"Brand" is a word that’s starting to stir up a hornet's nest of my outrage. It used to be that a brand was either something you burned onto a steer’s butt with a hot iron, or the name of a product you bought in a grocery store, like 20 Mule Team Borax, Quaker Grits, or Drano. Suddenly anything that moves, and some things that can’t even budge are brands. Ad agencies have ceased to be places that created brands and now are brands. Instead of worrying about the nation, President Obama suddenly has to worry about his brand. The new Tea-party conservatives and the old-fashioned conservatives are fighting over the Republican brand. Even the United States has ceased to be a nation and become a brand. "Fire up the branding iron, Homer, we’ve got over 260 million butts to round up and brand today!"

"Sustainable" is another word, the constant repetition of which is becoming unsustainable. How many damn misuses of the word can the world stand, before we unsustain its useage? We have sustainable farming, sustainable fuel sources, sustainable businesses. An educational institution of some kind called The New York Institute of Technology claims on its website it has “A Sustained Focus on Sustainability,” which may be the harbinger of a plague of malaprop buzzword speakers using double sustainabilities instead of double negatives.

Even Columbia University, which should know better, is getting into the sustainability melee. According to something called “The Earth Institute” at Columbia, “The Earth Institute has developed the Sustainability Essentials Training program for people who wish to explore the concepts and principles of sustainability, and who want to learn how to introduce sustainability practices in their organizations, new projects, and other aspects of their lives.” That’s three sustainabilaties  in one sentence. I guess those guys must be triple smart, although eventually, if you keep adding sustainability to a sentence, there’s going to come a point where the sentence is unsustainable.

And then there’s ‘meme.’ I once had an aunt who was a meme, although she spelled in “Mimi.” These days, everyone and his twisted brother is uncovering memes.

According to Wikipedia (not that you should always trust Wikipedia) “A meme (/ˈmiːm/; meem)[1] is "an idea, behavior, or style that spreads from person to person within a culture.[2] A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.”

In other words, a meme is an idea wrapped in something rather like a lethal virus or a cancer cell. Just the kind of thing you don't want to be caught dead putting out there, lest you actually end up getting caught dead. But people infected with meme-o-philia have used it to explain and excuse just about anything. Exhibit A is Richie Incognito of the Miami Dolphins, who claims his threat to fellow player Jonathan Martin, “I will murder your whole fucking family,” was actually not a threat, but a meme.

Somebody throw a whole bushel basket of well-curated rotten heirloom tomatoes at that man. Or better yet, let's pull an iron out of the fire and alter Richie’s brand.

Addendum, posted Nov. 14, 2013, Et tu, San Francisco Chronicle? From this morning's New York Times:

In the food-obsessed Bay Area, The San Francisco Chronicle’s food section has been as much of a city institution as the cable car, and to many San Franciscans, more useful. Over the years it has won many awards and developed a dedicated following.
Now, The Chronicle, owned by the Hearst Corporation, is planning to eliminate its stand-alone food section and integrate it into a single lifestyle section — tentatively titled “Artisan”