Why won't 'pop-ups' lie down and die?

Every day, a new one, a word or phrase that has become hideous, repulsive, vomit-inducing, tedious, or just plain boring, its meaning now perverted or worn-away,  thanks to its over-use or abuse for nefarious profit-hungry motives,  or simply thanks to the objectionable way it is being used or abused:

Today's worn-out word or phrase that hit that spot: "pop-up"

Six or seven years ago, there was suddenly talk of pop-up shops. For example, a sale of street artists' work,  including Banksies, in an empty clothes shop on Oxford Street, or someone flogging pulled-pork sandwiches to hungry clubbers in Shoreditch or hand-crafted cup-cakes somewhere in Bethnal Green. Whether or not it started in East London, this was the zone that jumped on, over-supplied and over-flogged the pop-up concept.

So we had years of pop-up art galleries, pop-up theatre or cinema, and for a while it was fun.

Then, come 2009, it became stale, at exactly the point  all the advertising agencies and marketing geeks and brand-builders and media bullies realised that "pop-up" was where the money went. From being stale, pop-up quickly became rancid, it started to stink.

And now middle-aged couples in Lincolnshire are visiting pop-up coffee shops in half-empty shopping malls. BBC Radio 4  has Pop-up Ideas. 


Pop-up is dead, but it will not lie down.

It keeps popping up, more and more, and is now more annoyingly popping-up than any of the ghastly Punch and Judy pop-up puppets.

Please, if you are tempted to join this battalion (or shooting gallery, or fusillade?) of popping-up people, just reconsider, or think of a new and better way to describe what you are doing.

Like, temporary, or short term. Short-let, squatted, alternative, hippie, punk, slacker, occasional, one-off, etc.

Flash-in-the-fucking-pan, perhaps.

A surprise!

A Mushroom mushroom stall  - it just pops up occasionally. Shrooms all round for that.

Pop-down?

Pop-but-pop-very-softly so-as-not-to-wake-the-old-people-next-door?

Pop out to pull a nice young man with a a lovely co-star hair-do?

Pop, pops? Poppy? What, opium poppy? Is it all a drugs conspiracy?

We should be told! We must be the first to know! We will pop your bleeding weasel, mate! matey!


So  - is a pop-up an expired quantity?

Yay!

Or, Nay!

Or possibly - Neigh!

Answers on a post-it. Note.