Many people discuss trends in terms of “the tipping point.” The point where a smaller movement becomes a larger, irreversable trend. It sort of irks me when I hear it because most of the people who use it are absolutely unaware of where it came from and its original meaning.
The term was first coined in the early 1960s by Morton Grodzins, when studying the racial integration of neighborhoods. White families stayed in their homes as long as the ratio between white and black households remained relatively high. At a certian point though, as the ratio changed, the white families would leave en-masse in a white flight.
It seems to me that the current meaning of tipping point has strayed from the original. The original seemed to imply when irrational xenophobia took over, the current seems to be a simple marketing analysis. In usupuring the word, I’m afraid it diminishes the fact that the racial issues that were originally being discussed still exist.
In a recent article titled The Long Snout, Tim O’Reilly uses the term Tipping Point for what seems to be a simple financial equation. Book publishing has a high fixed cost for a print run of books, and high variable cost for warehousing and shipping of small quantities over time. But when a book is a runaway hit, they aren’t in the warehouses, so the warehousing costs fall. More copies are ordered at once, so shipping costs fall, and the chance of returns shrink. Books that are hits are real hits. Books that don’t quite meet projects probably start to pile up losses very quickly. To me it doesn’t seem as much of a little things can make a big difference tipping point, but rather a somewhat interesting multivariable equation.
I know some people who will throw out terms like “grammar nazi” relatively easily. Probably because “grammar fascist” doesn’t quite have the same ring. I know others that want to maintain the association of the word Nazi with a particular historical evil and do their best to not dillute the word by mixing it up with someone with an in-depth knowledge of English and a case of OCD. I’m afraid that tipping point has long since been disassociated from its original meaning, and from now on will be used to describe any sharp upward curve on a graph.
When I hear the phrase “tipping point”, I think of a seesaw, with a grown up on one side, and a bunch of little kids on the other side, with more little kids getting on until the grown up goes up in the air (and then they let him fall on his ass by all jumping off at once, the little buggers). The tipping point there being, naturally, the point at which one option outweighs the other. While I don’t doubt that Morton Grodzins was the first to popularize “the tipping point”, I think the current usage (as popularized by Malcom Gladwell) is consistent with what the phrase actually means. However, I agree that it seems to be completely out of place in Tim’s article.