Friday, 30 October 2009

Vibrant



Vibrant 1.
Moving or quivering rapidly; vibrating. 2. Of sound, the voice: Characterized by or exhibiting vibration; resonant. Hence Vibrancy, the condition or quality of being vibrant.
   - Oxford English Dictionary

Vibrant: Vibrating: Thrilling: Resonant
   - Chambers

And here are some precise-phrase searches from Google:
 
"Vibrant community" 628,000 results
"Vibrant communities" 144,000 results
"Vibrant multicultural" 26,100 results
"Vibrant diverse" 35,200 results
"Vibrant" in UK news sources in the last week: 1,478 results
 
I wouldn't mind in the slightest if the word actually meant something, anything. I don't fret at people talking about the bonnet of a car because I know what the bonnet of a car is. The only really vibrant communites I can think of are Los Angeles during an earthquake and the Quakers.
 
Whilst wondering what precisely I would like to do to any journalist who so much as thinks about using the word vibrant to describe anything other than a vibrator or an electric toothbrush, I was inexplicably reminded of a passage in Gibbon describing the neo-platonist philosopher Hypatia of Alexandria:
 
Hypatia was torn from her chariot, stripped naked, dragged to the church, and inhumanly butchered by the hands of Peter the Reader and a troop of savage and merciless fanatics: her flesh was scraped from her bones with sharp oyster-shells and her quivering limbs were delivered to the flames.
 
Go on, tell me something's vibrant.

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