Great Word: Metastasize

You've probably been following the "circle-jerk" comment by the New York Times editor Bill Keller about bloggers. Check it out here on Jeff Jarvis' Buzzmachine.

I like Keller's description of the way something out of context or said in the heat of the moment which gets fixed in stone thanks to the Net:

But the thing about "the citizen's media," is that a distortion or a half-baked interpretation metastasizes in real time, and can quickly acquire the status of conventional wisdom.

Even if you have lots of time on your hands, there is little hope of pursuing and correcting the misunderstanding as it scatters across the digital landscape. Maybe eventually something like an accurate version of events emerges organically from this process, but I rather doubt it, and in any case the process itself is a little like watching someone chew with his mouth open.