The practice of calling things you don’t like ‘Zombie’ has long bothered the ZRC. Recently there has been a veritable epidemic of such namecalling about the study of our sickly honeybee population; bees wander off and die, for various reasons. Obviously this is a bad thing, at least if you like honey or eating fruits and vegetables, and studying the various phenomena to blame is a good thing.

But honeybees have been in trouble for years; they’ve only been ‘Zombies’, or here, ‘ZomBees’ since journalists and some scientists studying the problem figured out you get more attention with Zombie in the headline.

She looked perfectly normal. But what was she doing roaming around at night on the Google campus in Mountain View, Calif?

She’d been drawn out of her home, following the light, and now was taking mincing steps across a white bed sheet. Had she just taken “the flight of the living dead”? Was she actually a “ZomBee”?

Let’s all give a good groan at the misdirection/melodrama in the opening paragraph too.

But at least THESE bees are actually undergoing a profound biological change, albeit nothing like Undeath. No, it’s more of your parasites-making-insects-act-weird story. As opposed to, say, Zombie Stocks or Zombie Department stores or Zombie Economics, which were never alive to start with, let alone Undead.

Small comfort. As for us, we feel for the ZomBees, but they’re not really our clients, just some sick bugs.

Tags: Don't Use the Zed Word

This entry was posted by John Sears on Tuesday, August 21st, 2012 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.