Remember back in June when I used this space to rail against the misuse of the word curate and its various inflections? No? Stop right now and read it. I’ll wait.
Caught up then? Great.
Seems I was on to something. Bartom Swaim published a piece in the September 9 issue of the Times Literary Supplement (the piece can be read in its entirety over at Medium) pretty much making the same case:
“This usage has begun showing up in all sorts of places, typically where something is being sold, as a fancy substitute for ‘chosen’ or ‘selected.’ It’s a way to give a commonplace statement an aura of aesthetic sophistication.”
Swaim then goes on to poke fun at collaborate, bandwidth, stakeholder, and other stains on the language left by corporate America. Curate is merely a symptom, it seems; the disease itself is far more pernicious.
