As topics swirl across the Internet, our language changes
Copyright ? 2004 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.
Dan Rather went monkeyfishing for a story to make President Bush look bad. But he ended up jumping the shark so badly that the pajamahadeen forced him to resign as CBS Evening News anchor a full year ahead of schedule.
Oh, you may not have heard about "monkeyfishing"? And what the heck do "jumping the shark" and "pajamahadeen" mean? If you spend time on the Internet, you've probably learned these new words. But for those who haven't, their meanings and origins are fun.
Back in June 2001, the online liberal magazine Slate.com, then edited by Michael Kinsley (now editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page), published a piece by humorist Jay Forman.
Forman described an expedition he and a friend took to a remote, uninhabited island in the Florida Keys (called Lois Key) that was overrun by monkeys.
He said the monkeys got there because a pharmaceutical company had bought the island and stocked it with simians to assure a ready supply of research subjects. That crackpot story wasn't the central issue, however.
The main point was that the monkeys had overbred and eaten all the food on the island. So, Forman wrote, local fishermen had discovered it was possible to cruise up to the island in a boat, stick a big hook in a piece of fruit (apples and oranges were the preferred bait) and cast the line up into the trees.
When a hungry monkey grabbed the fruit, its paw would be impaled on the hook, and it could be reeled out of the tree - hence, "monkeyfishing."
This obvious hoax was purportedly played for real by Slate, despite its ludicrousness. James Taranto, the editor of OpinionJournal, the online version of The Wall Street Journal, is credited with debunking the story.
Apparently there is a "sport" called monkeyfishing in the South, in which good ol' backwoods boys would catch fish by either running electric current into a pond or tossing in a stick of dynamite. They would then use a net to scoop up the fish that floated to the surface.
Forman merely decided to pull a few legs by treating the term as if it were literal; it appears many people were fooled until Taranto debunked it.
Now, however, the term has entered the language as a synonym for excessive credulity on the part of a newsgathering organization taken in by a patently phony story - as in, "The New York Times printed tons of Jayson Blair's monkeyfishing before it caught him at it."
"Jumping the shark," on the other hand, comes from the wacky world of television comedy. As Taranto has also noted, in the last episodes of the series "Happy Days," when ratings had tanked, the writers were going far afield to attract viewers.
In one notable show, the supercool character Fonzie, played by Henry Winkler, went waterskiing - while naturally wearing his trademark leather jacket - and of course he was trailed by a shark.
The Fonz, however, made a narrow escape by going up a ski jump and sailing right over the pesky piscatory predator.
"Jumping the shark" thus came to mean any wildly excessive activity designed to attract attention to a person or group in a popularity tailspin. As, for example, "Aging poptart Britney Spears finally jumped the shark by marrying a high school friend for two days in Las Vegas."
Finally, politically active bloggers glory in a collective name coined by Jim Geraghty, who runs the "Kerry Spot" blogsite for National Review Online.
This term also came out of the Rathergate incident. CBS executive vice president Jonathan Klein (who is leaving that network to head up CNN) got mad at bloggers who had sliced and diced Gunga Dan's credibility.
Rather, holding on to a solid third-place standing in the network ratings, had hosted a "60 Minutes II" story on National Guard memos critical of Bush.
The bloggers, notably the people who blog at freerepublic.com, littlegreenfootballs.com and powerlineblog.com, pointed out the memos clearly had been written first in Microsoft Word. Their format and typeface were specific to that computer program, which didn't exist in the 1960s, when the memos were supposedly created.
Klein was irked by the fact that random people around the country had done far better research than his professional news staff. (Hmm. Could it have been a matter of greater motivation?)
So, he stereotyped a typical blogger as "a guy sitting in his living room in his pajamas writing what he thinks."
Geraghty immediately began proclaiming himself part of the "pajamahadeen," spun off "mujahadeen," a term for the Muslim holy warriors who kicked the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan.
Thus, if you have the wherewithal in your living room to show up a network and bring down an anchorman, doing it in your pajamas is a special badge of honor.
So, pass the popcorn, dear. I see CNN is jumping the shark to try to catch up with Fox News.
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