Please, deliver us from '24/7'

By JEANNE MALMGREN

© St. Petersburg Times, published May 17, 2000

[Times art: Jeff Goertzen]

Lately it seems like you hear it 24/7.

Everybody's using it, this phrase reduced to a set of numerals, once cool and now all too common.

Every catchy expression has a hipness trajectory and this one, alas, is arcing down.

Rappers must be cringing. The expression they coined a dozen years ago is now rolling off the lips of soccer moms and day traders. Full disclosure: "24/7" has appeared often in the St. Petersburg Times. An early reference, in 1997, was in a review of a book by ultra-hip writer David Foster Wallace, who used it along with such affectations as "w/r/t" (for "with respect to") and "and c." (for "etc."). Too cool.

Many others have since been quoted using the phrase: a north Tampa apartment manager; a Land O'Lakes firefighter; the director of a nursing home in Brandon; a Hillsborough County sheriff's deputy; and, memorably, the wife of a bull rider ("I dread the call. Not the one that says he's dead, the one that says I got to work the rest of my life so he can have a nurse taking care of him 24/7.").

A Miami street preacher told his flock, "The only one that's gonna watch your back 24/7 is God."

Indeed.

Then there's 21-year-old Joey, a USF student who lives in a Pinellas Park condo called Dude Dorm, where video cameras track the male residents' every move and beam it onto the Internet. Joey described life at the condo as "a party 24/7." When do they go out for salsa?

Pamela Munro, a UCLA linguistics professor who studies popular slang, first heard 24/7 in 1988. She still likes it.

"It expresses a concept that everyone needs to use in daily conversation, "all the time' or "every hour of the day,' " Munro says. "I think it's cute and interesting."

We did too, in 1988.

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