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Suddenly everyone wants to do a “deep dive” into every subject. Today, for instance, Pew offers a “Deep Dive into Party Affiliation.” The phrase appears in The Ridiculous Business Jargon Dictionary right after “decruit,” an Orwellian term for firing someone. I would have said that metaphorical uses of “deep diving” were much less common even a year ago, but these things are hard to measure. Books always provide a lagging indicator and don’t necessarily catch up with spoken language even after a delay. But the Google book trend for the phrase “deep dive” is interesting. It shows a rapid increase in the 1970s, a bear market for deep diving in the 1980s-1990s (my impressionable years), and then a steep upward slope until 2008, which is the last year of available data.
To decode the scale: this graph means that one of every five million phrases in printed books in 1972 was the phrase “deep dive.” Some uses probably referred to pearl fishers and Soviet submarines. But the increase could reflect an emerging business metaphor.
The word “cliché” was invented by French printers in the age of moveable type to refer to a precast word or phrase that could be dropped into text for efficiency. I don’t think you would bother to forge a cliché for the word “deep dive” as long as it stayed at the level shown above. Thus it isn’t literally a cliché. But two parts in every ten million seems like plenty to me.
Ah, language! Where would we be without it? … Adrift in a sea of unexpressed personal meanings.
As you call the phrase to our attention, the poetic sense it congers – for me — is
one of following a linear depth line with a single long-held breath and a lot
of muscular effort. It doesn’t speak to the type of equipment that will enhance
the experience of the dive. And it suggests that the effort will mark a point where a new depth has been touched, and then rapidly left in the depths. It doesn’t promise to reveal leverage structures … because the water at the bottom doesn’t push upward to support the water on the top in an obviously discoverable fashion.
Rapid resolution is one of our modern Western ideals. Our language provides a nudge is to avoid (frivolous?) exploring, and go straight to the prize. This favors
learning through confirmation (making distinctions) more than learning through
discovery (making connections). The author who lays out the depth line for the deep dive sets up the distinction making route. At best, this can simplify learning.
Expediency is a powerful tonic. A deep dive suggests that its natural alternative would be a slow, shallow dive … both of which would go beneath the surface from a top-down trajectory, but with contrasting levels of resource investment from its audiences. The alternative to a dive is a climb, of course. I don’t know what phrase with comparable power might exist to communicate learning through rapid, low-cost connection building – promising simplification at the fragile edge of simplicity. Maybe “barn raising” comes close?