Tipping point

[Kathleen E. Miller]

At 07:43 AM 10/1/2003 -0700, you wrote:
>Quoting Grant Barrett <gbarrett at WORLDNEWYORK.ORG>:
>
> > It was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell who wrote an article for the New
> > Yorker in 1996 on the subject, then a successful book.
>
> > On Wednesday, October 1, 2003, at 09:10 AM, James A. Landau wrote:
> >
> > > Has anyone run across the phrase "tipping point".  I don't recall
> > > having
> > > heard it before, then in the past week I saw it twice on-line.
>
>Gladwell didn't coin the phrase.
>
>The following appears on Usenet, soc.culture.indian, 23 Oct 1992:
>
>"Another view suggests that a tipping point in discrimination occurs when
>minorites evidence successes as this is perceived to be threatening to the
>host
>society."
>
>I'm a bit surprised it is this late. The metaphor is fairly obvious and basic.
>
>--
>Dave Wilton
>dave at wilton.net
>http://www.wilton.net/dave.htm


It's not. Here's the article Safire did on it based on my research and 
interviews. I was able to get it back to 1957.

THE WAY WE LIVE NOW: 7-27-03: ON LANGUAGE; Tipping
By William Safire
'I do think the concept of a tipping point is correct,'' Defense Secretary 
Donald H. Rumsfeld said on April 7, when asked about his frequent use of 
that phrase about public opinion in Iraq. ''And at some point, the 
aggregation of all those individual tipping points having been reached, it 
will be, in effect, the country will have tipped.''
With the unforgettable live television coverage of a symbolic event in 
Firdos Square in Baghdad, the two words were on many media lips in the 
following weeks. ''Like the giant statue of Saddam Hussein that slowly 
tumbled to the ground in central Baghdad yesterday,'' wrote Paul Ignatius 
in The Washington Post, ''the war in Iraq has been determined by a series 
of tipping points that mean the collapse of the regime.''

Then came the deluge of usages of that phrase in other contexts. ''School 
System at 'Tipping Point''' headlined The Financial Times. ''America has 
hit a tipping point in which fair-minded people now support equality,'' 
said a Freedom to Marry advocate after the Supreme Court decision striking 
down sodomy laws. In a Times Magazine article about offbeat names being 
given today's babies, Peggy Orenstein wrote, ''The tipping point came when 
Christie Brinkley, who is very visible, named her daughter Sailor because 
she and her husband liked to sail.'' (Coming soon for girls: Jade, Chloe, 
Destiny. For boys: Caleb, Liam, Tristan. Unfortunately for that last little 
fellow, girls are not predicted to be named Isolde. Now back to today's 
subject.)
The phrase that has become the overpowering cliché of the year was first 
popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in an influential 1996 article in The New 
Yorker, and in a subsequent best-selling book with that title. Subtitled 
''How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference,'' Gladwell deals with the 
way some ideas slowly spread and then suddenly take off. The New Yorker 
staff writer took the trope from epidemiology, the study of epidemics: 
''The tipping point is that moment in an epidemic when a virus reaches 
critical mass, the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot 
straight upwards.''
''AIDS tipped in 1982,'' Gladwell told his Web site, ''when it went from a 
rare disease affecting a few gay men to a worldwide epidemic. Crime in New 
York City tipped in the mid 1990's, when the murder rate suddenly 
plummeted. When I heard that phrase for the first time, I remember 
thinking: Wow. What if everything has a tipping point? Wouldn't it be cool 
to try and look for tipping points in business, in social policy or in 
advertising or in any number of nonmedical areas?'' (The writer's subtitle 
for his 1996 article was bottomed on the medical figure of speech: ''Why is 
the city suddenly so much safer -- could it be that crime really is an 
epidemic?'') This led sales-chartists to the related term, viral marketing.
Like a low-level flu, the phrase had been kicking around for years. In an 
endnote, Gladwell referenced a 1978 book by a University of Maryland 
professor of public affairs, Thomas Schelling, ''Micro Motives and Macro 
Behavior.'' Professor Schelling tells me that ''the first thing I published 
on tipping'' was in a chapter of a 1972 book on neighborhood racial 
segregation, and he directed me to an October 1957 article on that subject 
in Scientific American, by Morton Grodzins, a University of Chicago 
political-science professor.
''White residents, who will tolerate a few Negroes as neighbors, either 
willingly or unwillingly,'' Grodzins wrote nearly a half-century ago, 
''begin to move out when the proportion of Negroes in the neighborhood or 
apartment building passes a certain critical point. This 'tip point' varies 
from city to city. Once it is exceeded, they will no longer stay among 
Negro neighbors.''
Homer Bigart, the legendary New York Herald Tribune war correspondent and 
later New York Times reporter, picked up the phrase in that context in a 
1959 article on racial tension in Virginia. Bigart quoted the educator 
Robert Williams: ''Exactly when the tipping point of white acceptance will 
be reached will depend upon the attitude of the individual white parent and 
upon the general white community attitude.''
Says Schelling: ''The phenomenon was originally discussed in relation to 
residential patterns. I generalized it to many kinds of behavior in that 
1978 book.'' Gladwell then popularized and further generalized the concept, 
and the warrior Rumsfeld applied it to public opinion in Iraq, thereby 
carrying it into every home and hearth.
But it is now a tired, worn-out cliché, to be avoided by fresh thinkers 
like the plague. (Though avoided like the plague is also a bromide, its 
connection to epidemiology makes it apt in this case.)
The predecessor phrase, critical mass, though dated, is still usable. 
Nuclear physicists, who took the term, coined in 1940 by Prof. Margaret 
Gowing of Oxford University, to mean ''the minimum mass of fissile material 
required to sustain a chain reaction,'' still pout when lay writers extend 
its meaning to ''anything large enough to achieve the desired result.'' The 
metaphor is dramatic -- there's a mushroom cloud somewhere in the 
background -- but it has been in active use too long.
Pointillists will look at boiling point, but that does not suggest radical 
change. Focal point is about convergence, not transformation. Turning 
point? Not a lot of bezazz, and it does not express the idea of the straw 
that breaks the camel's back or the little extra quantity that causes 
systemic shift, but it makes the point of the moment of new direction and 
is probably the father of tipping point.
The difficulty in finding a forceful, colorful synonym demonstrates how the 
Grodzins coinage met a semantic need. But disdainers of cliché must ask 
ourselves, What is it that the overuse of tipping point has reached?
Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company