Xtreme Blogging

 


That's right—today we're going XTREME at the Raven—and you know what that means:

We're blogging naked! We're wearing cammo warpaint and listening to Morphine bootlegged CDs and we're ripping and burning more online. We've been washing down Vivarin with microbrewed beer and Peet's Maduro all morning! We've got more apps open than we can count and the desktop RAM Meter reads "It's All Gone!"

I've got jimmy-hats on my fingers and the radio's playing Nine-Inch Nails and Kate Bush is on the stereo. I'm eating carcinogenic snacks and all the windows are open. I'm using not one but two handcrafted Chinese backscratchers while uploading and downloading MP3s and I'm watching streaming videos of a guy lighting liquid oxygen in a Coleman stove. This is Xtreme Blogging and you'd better be down with it baby 'cause we're off, we're on that, and we're pushing this be-atch over the line!

Now I don't know about you, but when I hear "Xtreme" prepended to any noun or verb, those are the sorts of images that come to mind. And I'd like to find the guy that coined that usage, because if I did, I'd wrap him up in kerosene-soaked rags and set him on fire while dragging him down the street tied to my rear bumper and I'd cut him loose into a gator-infested swamp, smoking, bleeding, and screaming. It would be Xtreme. We can only speculate, but I'll bet Xtreme was hatched in the late 70s when "terminate with extreme prejudice" was a popular phrase. And then some joker added protein powder to his smoothie and labeled it "extreme" and pretty soon the word came to mean "juiced up" or "high-powered" or something like that.

If they'd left it alone at that stage, I wouldn't be on the warpath, but no, people never leave good stuff alone—they want to adopt it, co-opt it, and stick it on the bottom of a skateboard. So pretty soon "extreme" is getting devalued as an intensifier, and some wiseguy in the 80s gets the bright idea to drop the "e" and uppercase the "x" and then it starts to mean "insane." Like "nobody in their right mind would do this," and maybe we could still allow that. But with age comes wisdom, so the crazy stuff is being done by teenagers and here comes Xtreme sports. Now it seems to mean "flying through the air and spinning around and sometimes landing safely." But it still has all the earlier meanings too, so now you have an adjective with the winning combination of "youth" and "insanity," with "Hollywood stuntman." Hell, you can sell that in this country. And people started jumping onboard the "X"-train and today, if you walk through the marketplace, you will find the following:

This isn't just the devaluation of a word, it's a full-scale linguistic holocaust. Since nobody else is coming forward, the Raven hereby declares this word off-limits. I'm putting my clothes back on now. Extremus requiescat in pace.


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Last update: 1/25/03; 11:22:00 AM .

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