Odious Phrases

One thing that makes my expatriate-ness always hit home is when a new term I've never actually heard cross anyone's lips suddenly starts appearing in every third line in fashionable magazines. Naturally, I miss out on the organic formation and development stage of such terms; they don't get to my ears (or eyes, as it were) until they have already reached a critical mass of media saturation, which always makes me feel like the US is leaving me behind, which in turn leaves me feeling vaguely melancholic. For that reason, and for the fact that people using the term seem do so to be hip more than to advance a particular point, I hate most of them.

One recent example: teachable moment. The "teachable" part of it sounds rather condescending, as if there were a cohort of learned who were disposed to teach me at every event that opens my perennially blinded eyes just enough to see the light they are shining. "Learnable moment" would be an improvement, though still quite annoying. The larger problem is that for an open-minded person, there is no moment that isn't learnable. I've seen the Sotomayor hearings and the Gates arrest, two episodes with nothing in common but race, described as teachable, but what event that dominates the news for a week doesn't leave a large swath of the populace looking at an issue from a different perspective?