the buzz log

Hillary Clinton had it before Barack Obama won the Iowa Caucus. Obama ran with it for five days, until Clinton tripped him up in New Hampshire. Then, she lost her grip after Super Tuesday and he ploughed through before stumbling at the hurdles of Texas and Ohio.

We're talking "momentum," of course. Actually, pundits have been talking about it so much that "momentum" itself has come under scrutiny, as in this overview from NPR. A peek in Search unearths a 10% uptick in the term. Of course, the rise could be due to homework lessons rather than politically piqued curiosity, given follow-up Web forays into physics sites.

Still, considering the complete lack of "momentum" in Search this same time last year, it's tempting to attribute the acceleration to its ping-pong use in presidential campaign reporting. Plus, a handful of online queries have examined "obama momentum" and, more recently, "stop obama momentum ahead."

University of California professor and linguist Geoffrey Nunberg says that within the pages of The New York Times, the word is twice as common now than 50 years ago. Moreover, the phrase "'political momentum' appeared more often in 2004 than in the whole first first half of the 20th century." (NYT used the phrase about eight times, but you get the drift.)

This presidential election year will probably incinerate that record. Given the back-and-forth tug between Clinton and Obama, however, is the "momentum" usage even correct? Walter H.G. Lewin, a physics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, doesn't object to the colloquial appropriation.

"I have no qualms with it," he says. "It's a wonderful way of using the word. It has practically the same meaning as picking up speed." Literally, of course, momentum has something to do with being a product of mass and velocity, and something about a vector, but Lewin sees no reason to sully the "beauty of language" with scientific literalism.

Ask the linguist, however, and Nunberg points out that when media uses momentum, they're implying the probabilities of one win increasing the chances of another. One wouldn't say, for instance, "It rained yesterday, so rain has momentum," he says. In the Clinton-Obama race, "to use momentum is to misrepresent the political reality."

Point taken. So might there be a better analogy to use in the next eight months? Odds, perhaps, like in "who's got a better shot of going ahead," Nunberg says, or who will get more media attention. Otherwise, "there's nothing to say about it." Sounds like time to learn about the conservation of momentum.