OK, I am back to cliches in the news because I've heard one phrase about a dozen times a day over the past couple of weeks: game changer.
Webster's New World College Dictionary defines game changer as anything that significantly alters the way something is done or thought about.
Game changer started in sports, which isn't surprising with the occurrence of all those games. But in the sports world, game changers don't truly change the game, the rules and sport or anything too grand. They more often change the score of the game, perhaps moving the team that had been behind to the team in the lead.
The phrase has moved to other realms, including business, marketing and politics. It has expanded to describe a wholesale change of course. And it has settled in for too long of a stay.
The late, great William Safire, who wrote the column "On Language" for The New York Times, investigated the history of game changer. He said it was used first in an article about baseball. The score changed, and that was dubbed a game changer.
But the phrase became widespread and more expansive by the 2008 presidential race. I have to use Safire's words to convey his supremely dry wit:
"'Obama needs to introduce a game-changer,' David Gergen blogged on the eve of the Democratic convention, before voters considered him 'too much of a risk in the Oval Office.' As the Republican convention began, Michael Feldman observed in The Washington Post, 'McCain wants and needs a game-changer,' but the writer saw the choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as 'fraught with peril.'
"The modifier game-changing (which I say to hyphenate) has roared past full-throated (an 1819 coinage of the poet John Keats in his 'Ode to a Nightingale') as the hottest compound adjective of the presidential campaign."
(Please note that Safire says to add a hyphen to game changer, but The New York Times always has different customs. Webster's New World College Dictionary, which The Associated Press prefers, doesn't use the hyphen. Also, I fully agree that full-throated is another too-ubiquitous term.)
Finding game changer in 2021 Washington Post articles was effortless.
Jan. 3: "When insulin was discovered in 1921, it was a game changer," Gabbay said. It transformed Type 1 diabetes from a death sentence to a chronic disease.
Jan. 4: [A New Zealand woman's] involvement in conservation efforts on nearby Stewart Island-Rakiura and in her community of Riverton is her way of helping to reverse some of the damage wrought by colonization.
"It's a game changer," she says.
Jan. 10: "'Labor is a huge cost of oyster agriculture. And if some of that can be automated, as well as powered by the sun, that would be kind of a game changer for production costs in the bay,' Gray said."
Jan. 11: "When the Smithsonian introduced a futuristic plan for the 17 acres around its iconic administration building, the National Historic Landmark known as the Castle, officials predicted it would be a game changer that would remake the structure into a visitor gateway to the storied institution."
Jan. 29 (I found three): "The one-shot vaccine could be a game changer," according to Jonathan Temte, a vaccine expert at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health."
Jan. 29: "Could [baby bonds, or bonds that would fund a pot of money for every baby born in the United States] be an economic game changer for millions of Americans, helping to also close the racial wealth gap?"
Jan 29: "Kristen Harknett, a professor of sociology at the University of California at San Francisco who studies hourly workers, said the incentives [small cash bonuses and other things to encourage employees to get the coronavirus vaccine] — especially paid time away from work — will be a game changer for hourly grocery workers."
Feb 5: "The program in charge of these efforts — the National Institutes of Health's ACTIV program — only began pursuing therapeutics in the summer and largely focused on small trials of expensive, targeted monoclonal antibodies, convalescent plasma and other advanced therapeutics. But these will never be game changers."
And back to Jan. 4 again just for the flavor change:
"[A certain anti-mildew paint], promoted especially for use in bathrooms, was a game-changer when it went on sale, because it carries a five-year warranty against mildew growth on the paint."
Even the world of mildew is undergoing a game change. These are truly great times.
All right, so what do you use when you don't want to use game changer, as nearly everyone around you does? Here are a few synonyms to express a significant alteration of a situation:
How about difference, modification, redoing, refashioning, remaking, remodeling, revamping, review, revision, reworking or variation?
P.S. As I write this, an MSNBC anchor used game changer. One of these days I will do a count for the entire day.
P.P.S. Darn, when I was writing about funny questions that show up on Google, I pasted one to an "ideas" document I keep. I forgot to look for it when I wrote that column, but I found it today. I typed in "Which side of the chicken ..."
Google answered, "which side of the chicken is breast side up."
I am dumbfounded. Wouldn't you think that breast side up is breast side up?
Sources include Merriam-Webster, Webster's New World College Dictionary, The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Washington Post. Reach Bernadette at
bkwordmonger@gmail.com