Today I decided to find out what the phrase jumping the shark means, and where it comes from. You know how it is. You hear a word or phrase over and over. It would be so easy to look it up and check, but you don’t. Of course you’ve got some idea of its meaning from how it’s used, and in this respect you’re like a non-native speaker trying to learn English by immersion in the language. And the so-called irony here is that I’ve probably learnt its true meaning too late, because everybody’s stopped using it by now. Yes, come to think of it, I haven’t heard anybody saying it lately.
What triggered my decision to look it up was a vague feeling that it might apply to my AI-generated images. You see, I’ve noticed that these types of images are cropping up a lot on various social media, which makes me wonder how long I can continue to use them. The style and colour palette of the default images are quite samey: corny and cheesy you might say. Some of them (old Brit reference alert) are like those paintings you used to see on Boots’ staircase. Pretty soon people are going to start mocking them, if they haven’t already, especially if the far right begin using AI to generate images of hoards of furriners on the streets of London. Obviously I could try giving more sophisticated instructions to ChatGPT in order to add stylistic variety, but I’m not sure I could be bothered. My feeling is that I’m using the images ironically, so it doesn’t matter. However the problem with doing anything ironically is that people need to know you’re doing it ironically. Or maybe they don’t need to know. Maybe that doesn’t matter either.
Well, after all that self-flagellation, jumping the shark doesn’t seem to be a great fit for my predicament. As far as I can see it refers to the moment when a TV series (or other creative endeavour) starts to go downhill following some gimmicky and risible content. The original shark-jumping was a scene in Happy Days where Fonzie jumped over a shark while water skiing. The show, apparently, was never the same after that. (I can’t comment because I never watched it.) In Happy Days the shark was part of the show. I insist that my shark and show are two separate things!
Blackthorn 