It used to be that you could take notice at the outset of a poor essay or speech when it began with the dictionary definition for the central topic. The Simpsons referenced this at least once

Homer: “What is a wedding? Websters defines it as a process of removing weeds from ones garden.”

But now lazy bloggers and NPR journalists are pretending to channel the zeitgeist by using the number of Google hits for their term as a proxy for cultural relevance. When the numbers are over 1,000,000, how meaningful is this? It’s simply a cheap cliche.

Full disclosure: I’ve probably done both of these and will probably do them both again. In the interest of always trying to tell better stories, I will attempt not to, however.