As a linguist I’m rarely surprised when people start saying something new. Language change is the norm, not the exception, after all. The radio news media on the other hand doesn’t use natural language. They script and produce nearly everything they say, and even when they’re unscripted, They’re performers, professionals who are aware of being around hot mics all day.
A news presenter saying something surprising then, that’s surprising. After Cory Booker dropped out of the race for Democratic candidate for president, Noel King asks Asma Khalid, “Given how much people liked him, why was he not stickier?” (listen from 2:38 in)
I’m not an etymologist, but “sticky” as it’s used here is something that I’m familiar with only in the way that marketers will refer to whether or not use of a product quickly leads to habitual use. Definitely never heard it used to mean, “popular,” but the extension of meaning is natural enough.
The inner meaning is what’s more interesting to me. I learned this usage for “sticky” from Nir Eyal’s Hooked, a very popular and influential marketing book that couches product development and creation in terms of habit formation, addiction, and involuntary neuropsychology. Spoiler alert, if the title didn’t do that already: The ideal of the book is to create a loop of addiction to ensure your product’s success.
As a highly-biased person relying on memory (and a few web searches), I’m making associations here. But that it appears at all in terms of a candidate for office during the United States’ years-long campaign cycles is telling, especially given the sitting president’s staff has described learning of policies, events and statements by watching his Twitter feed.
Twitter itself is the very opposite of depth, not even a news bite, more like a news crumb, but more importantly, it being social media. By definition, the bent and persona of the poster is impossible to remove from content of the post. Rather, not separating them is the very point of social media; otherwise, an objective viewpoint or an openly partisan one as found on the masthead is just called “media.”
It’s surprising then that our public news media asks about the “stickyness” of a candidate, because unpacking the question a little, it becomes something more like, “why are people not moved to consume more of the Cory Booker product?”
Even though elections are frequently compared to popularity contests, beauty contests, and other forms of measurement we don’t think of as high-minded and ideological, they are supposed to ultimately be about the “content” of the candidate, right?
(if that seems naïve, don’t mind me, I’m Canadian.)