Three things in this life are, it would seem, inevitable: death, taxes, and New York‘s Vulture blog (which covers pop culture) misusing the term “inevitable.” Yesterday, the blog asked who would star in the “inevitable News of the World movie”–you know, because media scandals are always turned around, right away, into docudramas which lend themselves easily to SEO-enriched comment threads listing red-haired Hollywood actresses.
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines “inevitable” as “incapable of being avoided or evaded.” Given the general breakdown of language–specifically online language–into a string of “infamous”es, “random”s, and “pretty much amazing”s, we can call it, well, inevitable that a word which colloquially means the end result of a grinding chain of events (and which originated in Middle English!) now means “a funny confluence of cultural phenomena that, individually, get traffic.”
Ranked from most inevitable to least inevitable (from inevitable to avoidable, that is), these are the things that Vulture headlines have called “inevitable” in 2011.
–The “backlash” (a word likely deserving its own listicle) against James O’Keefe’s video “sting” against NPR. [This is actually a Daily Intel article, perhaps explaining why “inevitable” is used correctly!]
–A reality TV series about the rapper Ice-T and his wife, the glamour model Coco.
–A parody of Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” by a group of people who evidently make a lot of music video parodies.
–A movie about the News of the World scandal.
–A YouTube video of Hitler (from the movie Downfall) reacting to Lars von Trier’s Nazi jokes at Cannes.
–A parody of the Harry Potter series set to Rebecca Black’s “Friday,” or vice versa.
–A Snoop Dogg song about Charlie Sheen.
ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_
