Fifteen Minutes of Jive

In the future, owing to texting, tweeting and websites such as the Urban Dictionary, everyone and his brother will begin to coin phrases (such as "preemptive karma") and the person of the moment who finds himself atop Fortuna's Wheel of Elocution will be, for an instant, the cat's meow. Fifteen Minutes of Jive refers to such a scribbler's brief moment in the spotlight. As it has always done, language will then move on and the word of the moment will be replaced by yet another - only at a noticeably accelerated pace. This will of course lead to Jive Lag and Jivemire as well as Jivemires and a situation in which what was hip at, say, 9:15, will now be considered boorish by 9:35.

In the twenty-first century, the world did not seek out the cleverness of Oscar Wilde in the embodiment of a single individual, but instead sought to steep itself in a continuous omnipresent wit in which billions of individuals could, if only briefly, communally participate in being the life of the party and experience their clever moment in the sun: their fifteen minutes of jive .

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