zeitgeist (n.): the general intellectual, moral, and cultural climate of an era

Zeitgeist is a word I use abundantly, most frequently in the phrase “Get your head in the zeitgeist!” This is because it’s an awesome word. It’s one of that precious handful of German words that have been imported into English wholesale to describe concepts for which we have no concise terminology. (Others that spring to mind are bildungsroman, weltanschauung, schadenfreude, and gestalt — there are others, all of which I adore, but I’m blanking on them at the moment.)

I bring it up now because I’m having one of those moments where I’m in awe of the combination of coincidence and common cultural memes that produce bizarre experiences, moments where the same obscure, isolated thing emerges from the zeitgeist multiple times in multiple places. What the hell am I talking about? Well, see here. The internet has done more for the zeitgeist than, well, anything else ever. I was just recently introduced to the oeuvre of Betchslap.com, a klatch (hey! there’s one!) of content creators whose website is extremely cryptic but whose work can be found on YouTube. Their highlight has to be Shoes, but they also did a fairly clever video called Text Message Breakup. Three guesses as to what it’s about.

OK, so I watched that on Tuesday. Today, I find out that the Prime Minister of Finland broke up with his girlfriend via text message. Amused and intrigued by the way this coincidence came to me, I poked around a little bit and found that evidence suggests that K. Federline found out B. Spears was filing for divorce via text message. ZEITGEIST.