I listened to a teacher's presentation the other night and she repeatedly used the phrase "new pendulum" as in "multimedia composition is the new pendulum in education". Has anyone else heard this phrase? I found it a rather confused metaphor. Do new pendulums work any differently than old pendulums? If the phrase alludes to things swinging in a new direction, doesn't it also imply that things will eventually swing back?

I gather that it means upcoming force, as in

to Give an Answer » Fundamentalism RecastWhen they saw the pendulum of fundamentalism at its apex in one wrong direction, they built a new pendulum of evangelicalism and set it in motion toward the ...
blog.mytechaid.com/archives/2005/07/18/fundamentalism-recast/

Then why not call it the new force?

Don't answer that - it's clearly a manifestation of "academe-speak".

It would be quite wrong to some academic minds to use a simple and accurate word or phrase when there are so many compex and confusing ones available!

Rich: Good question. But the expr does have a colorful ring. Perhaps it's meant to imply that the movement gains momentum as it swings forward

or that a reaction to the force could develop so that eventually the pendulum is expected to swing back

I have no idea what it's supposed to mean and neither, I suggest, did the person who said it.

Rch: I'll bet (wager) you're right

Yet some off-the-wall exprs do ring that old bell

The analogy of the pendulum is used in computational linguistics to describe the varying popularity of rule based approaches versus machine learning approaches. When one rises, the other falls.

I suspect the presenter wasn't talking about computational linguistics, though.

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it's clearly a manifestation of "academe-speak".

Richard, you really are anti-academe, aren't you? The fact is, it might just be a very bad metaphor.

So has anyone heard this "new pendulum" thing or am I the first to spot it in the wild? I don't count Seanahan's sighting as it's a normal pendulum metaphor.

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Richard, you really are anti-academe, aren't you?

Not always - but I have certainly heard some nonsense from academics - which is oftimes given credence simply because it comes from the pen or a well-known academic.

That's not unique to academics, of course. The words of celebrities are usually given more credence than the words of nonentities - that's sadly the way of the world in which we presently live.

That's not unique to academics, of course.

That's true. I hear an awful lot of blithering blather coming from non-academic circles, too.

I suspect that the person meant to say, "new paradigm," but got it wrong. That expression is pretty common around these parts.

Rich, zm: Truly, and that's probably how Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger reached their high status

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I suspect that the person meant to say, "new paradigm," but got it wrong.

I think you may well be right, Asa. More managementspeak...

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Not always - but I have certainly heard some nonsense from academics - which is oftimes given credence simply because it comes from the pen or a well-known academic.

Of course, as in any other profession or occupation, there are the losers. However, I don't think the percentage is any different than in any other career path.

I am not sure that "paradigm" and "pendulum" could be confused. I suspect the metaphor meant that it's the new issue that will be going in different ways. I checked "new pendulum" on Google, and while there were 13,000+ sites, many talked about clock pendulums. In fact, this thread was on Google's first page of "new pendulum," amazingly enough. Yet, there were a few other sites. This quote: "My current Mackerras Pendulum was published in The Weekend Australian for November 20 and 21 of 2004. When the new maps are final I shall offer the new pendulum again to The Australian newspaper." was from this
site, and a similar comment here and here. It seems to be used in Australia for politics.

Otherwise, though, I couldn't find anything similar on Google, and there was nothing in Google News.

The fact that there are no Google hits on that phrase in a similar context leads me to believe that it was a coinage of her own, and that Arnie and Asa are correct that it was a confusion with new paradigm. She also used "new paradigm" in her talk, so maybe it's a personal quirk that she sometimes says "new pendulum" when she means "new paradigm".

She may have meant "pendulum" to mean "paradigm," I agree, though I think it was her coinage for that meaning. I doubt that she got the words mixed up because they are too different. However, I've been wrong before and undoubtedly will be again.

I, for one, did not go through all 13,000 Google citations for "new pendulum." There still could be a similar use to the teacher's.