Actually it’s the word “curate” that I hate. I’m sick of seeing it used all over the Internet as a pretentious substitute for some vague activity that, other than being the stuff of the aesthetically leechful–that is, I don’t think one would curate one’s own play–forms no mental image whatsoever. Entire domains and companies specialize in it:
- www.curate.us
- www.curatenyc.org
It is a word for people who don’t like words. Those who prefer nonverbal forms of communication such as images bristle at the specificity of language. Hence, an article on a film festival says:
Scorsese, who is curating The Director’s Cut, a unique four-night film season at the Port Eliot Festival in Cornwall this June, clearly agonised over an opening film that would live up to the grandeur of the setting in 4,000 acres of Humphry Repton-designed parkland.
To quote Charlie Sheen, “What does that even mean?” That is, I’m pretty sure people using the word are repeating it as jargon and knowing what they wish to connote without even having the foggiest of what they wish to denote. They are as likely using it as a more refined form of the word “curing” (meat) as opposed to deriving it from the word meaning a person who cares for souls.
The NY Times noticed this trend in 2009, but clearly the sloppiness of usage has increased since:
Any activity that involves culling and selecting.
Searching for recent tweets using the word, however, shows it now has a chameleon-like quality:
Are you curating inside your organization?
That sounds like a discreet way of asking “are you stewing in your own juices?” Be that as it may, help stamp out the unfortunate new popularity of a dismal usage by appropriately sneering whenever you encounter curate in prose or conversation–at least of the non-ecclesiastical variety.
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