Word: fad
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...environmental awareness is trendy. Earth Day is a "hot topic." But current environmentalism has become a widespread fad by sacrificing rigorous standards of conservation. The issues being discussed and the changes being demanded are the kind that nearly everyone can support. They are moderate. In return for money and publicity, Earth Day organizers have focused on creating a sense of festivity rather than on changing government policy and corporate behavior...
...image has been hijacked by cheap merchandise does not in itself diminish the importance of Earth Day. But by treating the event as if it were the Super Bowl or Head of the Charles Weekend, its message is obscured, and support for environmental conservation is reduced to a mere fad. Earth Day now more resembles the Simpsons or Batman than a crucial consciousness-raising event...
When a "movement" becomes a "trend," it usually succumbs to the same fate as any popular fad--burn-out and eventual neglect. Recall Live Aid, the super-mega concert that graced everyone's TV screen five years ago. In the mid-1980s, caring about hunger suddenly became fashionable after some pop stars got together and made a few mushy records on the subject. By the summer of 1985, hunger-mania had reached epic proportions and the Live Aid concert was dubbed the event of the decade...
...psyche and vocabulary of the '80s. "People ask for Perrier when they want mineral water," says Dan Rose, a bartender at an uptown Manhattan restaurant, "the same way they ask for Kleenex when they want a tissue. Perrier has come to mean mineral water." Riding the decade's fitness fad, sales jumped 190% in seven years...
...fad has even caught on in the Third World, with much of the news of recent elections in South America and India dominated by reports about polls. That is more than a little disturbing. For, as the best pollsters recognize, the deepest questions of life -- or politics, or journalism -- can be probed only in the most primitive manner with the blunt instrument of a poll. Thus readers entering upon stories peppered with numbers and percentage signs should arm themselves with a mental note: POLL AHEAD -- PROCEED AT YOUR OWN RISK...