Word Disrupted

It’s way too late to suggest getting rid of “disrupt,” so all that’s left now is to figure out what it’s supposed to mean. We are stuck with it, and it will be used; it is stuck with us, and it will suffer many shapes. Jenji Kohan created Weeds, then moved to Netflix to make a show about women in prison: Fairly disruptive. “I’m easy to work with, unless you piss me off,” she says in a cover quote: Neither disruptive nor non-disruptive.

Nic Pizzolatto did a show on HBO about two difficult men whose most memorable lines he may or may not have cribbed from a book about difficult men: Not very disruptive. Or is a disrupter someone who does something, anything, notable? “There’s this assumption that television people must be all things to all people. And I would rebel against that. I don’t think that’s the role of art in society,” says Pizzolatto. Strictures about the role of art in society? Not very disruptive!

And then the issue of the e, the er:

@robotopia It was discussed and we basically flipped a coin. And frankly, I think @ShantiMarlar liked the way the “e” looked better.

— Janice Min (@janicebmin) August 6, 2014

It does look better. Is this disruption? I think so.