In the comment section following Jay Rosen's article last week about Glocal Man, several folks have been critical of the word glocal -- an inelegant hybrid that's too cute by half.
I completely understand. I started out hating the word myself and for a couple of years I tried out several other ones, such as worldplace.
Has anyone thought of a truly good word for the important human effort to consider one's local and global addresses (e.g., "10 Oak Street" and "Planet Earth") within the same breath and thought?
I've not been able to, so keep coming back to the clunky hybrid. To my surprise, given my initial distate, I ended up accepting the word glocal in my own head and my own ear. And despite its closeness to the sound of "local" it does come across distinctly when spoken, I find.
There's perhaps a little deeper issue at work here. It's interesting that most journalists, even though they are liberal in politics, are in my experience very conservative culturally, at least in respect to language.
Don't we journalists tend to think the language should pretty much stay exactly where it was at the time we first learned it? Aren't we really skeptical of neologisms until they get some kind of imprimatur that makes the neologism newsworthy -- as with hip hop lingo, Silicon Valley jargon, surfer talk, and other language trends?
But if we are always waiting for a pop trend or a best-selling book to legitimize what's newsworthy, might we overlook something that's truly important but just hasn't happened to become a megatrend or giant moneymaker yet?
In the case of glocal, I felt I had to get over my reluctance to be accused of trendiness and New Age-iness and just go with the best word I had to describe something I felt was important. And the best I had, I felt, was glocal.
I almost hope I chose wrong. If a more elegant and accepted term comes up, I will try to be the first to adopt it and to drop the word that sounds a choking duck and that Tom Brokaw could never pronounce.
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