Which rock from the sun are you on?

I tend to look askance at trends, wherever they occur. And they occur in so many places, from clothing (a little flare on the pants leg is rather comfortable, actually) to the things taught in schools (what happened to ebonics?). More to the point, I am wary (not weary) of the motives behind the adoption of trends. They're picked up so quickly in order to fit in or to be trendier-than-thou only to be discarded when something else shiny comes down the line.

I put trending words in that lineup as well, especially anything that looks on the verge of being part of the standard lexicon (hangry, I may like you, but you're there too). While I don't doubt some really are chosen based on the numbers generated by searches and hits on social media, I wonder how much the other choices are inspired by the writers for hire's lives/neighbors/mirror, and how much is a result of research replacing understanding. (Pat-pat for the effort.)

This is the double-edged sword of using someone else's definition as a standard. On the one hand, having a common standard makes it easier to get information and ideas (from the minutiae of feet and meters to the more monumental ones of interplanetary exploration) from one point to another. On the other hand, get a quibbling little detail wrong, and you get a how-many-million-dollar whoopsie on Mars.

Digressions are fun, but getting away from the original point, so I'll bring it back to words. Just how often are words used in say, education, or entertainment, or in advertising? And what are those that make the standards for words doing with the example they set?

Trends tend to fade, and trend words with them. While I'll admit that some of the trends I see reflect an ideal I might actually agree with, there are others that I can't wait to see gone. I might mourn the loss of a trend that's based on something more fundamentally valuable than whatever some hammy huckster (I miss my hamster) thinks will draw a crowd, but I won't be surprised when it goes, and will gladly shove the rest out the window after it. (Well, facial hair can go. I'm keeping the cilantro and moringa.)