Wordplay

Once again, my poor choice of terms gets a well deserved evisceration by Uncle Ken, in this case it was 'immature nation.'  If I didn't also use the expression 'growing pains' I may have gotten away with stating that I meant immature in the sense of a wine or single malt whiskey.  I'll take the hit on this one.

Anyhow, the point I was trying to make is that the US has a unique cultural identity, one that is still in development and is less cohesive than that of other nations such as France or Germany.  I'm still working on this theory and a better way to describe it without resorting to hokum.

-----

Hokum is a great word and is one of those old timey words that should be in greater use today; it would look swell in a newspaper's page one headline.  I like it better than 'fake news.'  And how about that budding wordsmith, the Little Rocket Man himself, using the word 'dotard' to describe the Cheeto in Chief?  I don't think I've ever heard that word before so I had to look it up and it is very apt but it could also describe myself at times. But I'm not president, so there isn't much risk to national security.  There's another old word that I've seen more frequently lately, kakistocracy, which describes the Trump administration perfectly, especially some of those Cabinet appointees.

-----

Mr. Beagles mentioned 'flash mobs' and that he hasn't heard much about them lately.  They're still around and are a popular way to rob stores, getting twenty or thirty kids to run in and strip the shelves.  Maybe it's a city thing, but such criminal methods lack finesse and elegance.  It's not like Cary Grant in It Takes a Thief.   You might as well drive a stolen van through the front windows, which they also do.  Since these dummies often brag on social media and post videos they are frequently apprehended, so there might be 'flash arrests,' too.

-----

First the idea, and then the behavior itself spreads from one to another like a virus or something.

Ah, Mr. Beagles is describing a 'meme,' a neologism coined by Richard Dawkins.  It's not often that a new word gets invented and enters common usage, but meme is a nice one and not based on a product or acronym.  I don't know what today's popular memes are, but I suspect they are mostly hokum.