I'm in the middle of marking some essays answering one of the questions on one of the May papers from IB. The question requires an analysis of quite an interesting little opinion piece on the use of AI tools by designers and is thought-provoking in its way, but one detail has stood out for me, not because it's a major analytical point but since it relates to a small change in the language I've noted quite recently. This is the use of creative as a noun, a countable one, as in: the creatives were gathered in the main office discussing the latest advertising campaign.
As far as I can tell this is quite a recent usage, but I seem to be encountering it all over the place (now including passages used in exams.) The thing is that, for some reason I can't quite grasp, I find it distinctly irritating. And I'm not the only one. I noticed that Kim Gordon, of Sonic Youth fame, complained about the word in a recent interview.
Now normally I'm quite happy to embrace linguistic change, I suppose because of the inherent creativity involved in coining new usages. (See what I did there!) But I think it's the element of self-congratulation in the word that gets to me. I mean, imagine thinking of yourself as a superior creative, and I reckon that the sense of superiority is definitely there if you regard yourself in that way. But who knows, maybe this just gets under my skin out of a sense of envy, a feeling that somehow I should be creative but fall short of the mark when there are folk out there who can do it for a living?
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