"Ersatz" Erudition

The title of this post is deliberately pompous. It's also a very bad pun, for which I apologize. I also apologize for being fairly random in my musings today (more so than normal, heh). This is just something I wanted to get out of my head, really, something that popped into my mind today.

Is it just me, or has the word "ersatz", a word I had never heard or read much at all in English until about a year or so ago, suddenly and inexplicably popular?

I'd like to note here that I'm actually pretty well-read, perhaps not in all the classics (some of which - The Scarlet Letter for instance - are better seen as something of historical value that happens to have some valid, lasting social commentary, then as a "good read". As books go, some of the "classics" are often painfully bad writing by today's modern standards, but the other factors make them interesting or worth studying. An exception of course being Frankenstein, which is a damn good thriller considering it was written in a time when people didn't mind wading through three pointless but pretty pages of botanical description before they even see a character)... but I digress; my point is, I do read a great deal. And not stuff that talks down to you, either. I read books for fun that include such turns of phrase such as "argent light" or words like "salacious", and actually damn near applaud when I find something written in modern times where words like "trollop" are used (then again, can you get more fun than "trollop"? "Harlot" may be wonderfully snide and educated and vaguely British-sounding and almost pretty really, and "slut" may have that great, brutal, guttural, spat-out swearword feel, and "whore" may have its delicious, hiss-like brute force as well as the implication that not only is the woman promiscuous she's also an actual prostitute, but you can't get much more fun than a word for "sexually wayward woman" that sounds kind of like it could be an edible fungus). But, again - I digress, don't I?

The first time I recall seeing the word "ersatz" - and this is when I initially looked it up - it was in a book called Bad News: The Decline of Reporting, the Business of News, and the Danger to Us All, by Tom Fenton, which is about the systematic dumbing down and filtering of modern news production and how it has hurt us. In the first chapter - or perhaps it was the introduction or something, I'm not sure which - it refers to people getting all their news from "ersatz news shows" like The Daily Show, and how this is supposedly a bad thing (never mind the fact that The Daily Show is actually surprisingly informative at times, especially if you actually watch the interview segments with book authors, and that if you ignore the occasional off-color joke - after all, it is on Comedy Central you know - it practically trains the viewer to recognize the difference between satire and fact, or for that matter, the lines that are fed to us versus what common sense should tell us, and that it also practically trains us to be perceptive enough to understand all the semi-obscure references it makes not just to pop culture but to history and current events as well, making, in my opinion, for a surprisingly and impressively informed and cynical viewership considering the same show also makes jokes about bodily functions or hookers from time to time. Er, but I digress again, don't I?). I'll note here that I actually didn't mind the book from what little I got to read, it just bugged me, both that implication and the translation of "fake news show" (which is literally what the Daily Show bills itself as) to something ridiculously pompous like "ersatz news".

Suddenly though, in the past year or two, everybody seems to use it. Even (ironically, given the above paragraph) at least one person on The Daily Show (possibly even Stewart himself, I can't recall).

My question is: why?

It's like it's all of a sudden a buzzword, much like "paradigm" or "synergy", something everybody uses without even stopping to think that maybe it might be better to just out and out say what you really mean, instead of trying to sound smart by using fancy words. Don't forget that I say this as a person who likes the word "trollop", to boot.

I won't deny that "ersatz" does, in point of fact, have a delicious feel to it. It sounds almost Yiddish, and it comes directly from German (in which it means "replacement" or "substitute"), it's got that lovely z on the end, and a throaty, grunty beginning and I could go on and on, really. My point is, though, that it is not often necessary, and it's overused a bit, when a simple "fake" or "faux" or "imitation" would do. "Ersatz" is a great word, it really is, but much like "harlot" or "trollop", it will lose its power and effectiveness and deliciousness the more you use it in such pointlessly translated descriptions as "ersatz news".

"Ersatz news" sounds vicious, malicious even, a better description of Fox News (which is often grossly or weirdly distorted or just plain greatly over-sensationalized*, but tries to pass itself off as "fair and balanced") than The Daily Show, which while it parodies newscasting, also points often to the flaws in "real" news coverage. The feel, the sound is I think all wrong for what the author of that book surely intended, which was "parody" or "fake". Even "pseudo" would have sounded less pompous and less unnecessarily Germanic than "ersatz". I realize that he was implying that it was literally a replacement for "better" news, but the end effect is that he almost sounds like he's insulting what's actually a (surprisingly) good informational source.

Now, I get that the way Fenton was using it is normal. I get that that's what it means in English, really. But it always seems like it's used where such a wonderfully snarky-sounding word doesn't need to be used. It's overkill. It's showy erudition where one does not, honestly, need to sound all that erudite. It's like "paradigm"; a word that is used because it sounds cool and sounds vaguely "educated". Or an unnecessary foreign substitute, like "faux fur" instead of "fake fur", only to my mind, it's more of a shame to use it than "faux" because of the wonderful sound of it.

In short, it doesn't deserve to lose the power awarded it by its great sound, especially since, unlike zeitgeist, there are perfectly legitimate, less pompous-sounding equivalents in normal, plain English that would work just as well if not better in most of the cases I have seen it used lately.



*It still amuses me to recall that when those chimps in the wild started fashioning and using spears to hunt smaller animals for food, every online news report I saw on it described it in their headlines as "Chimps Learn to Use Spears" or somesuch... except for Fox News' website, which described the respective animals in its headline as "Killer Chimps". I kid you not.