Sometime around week three of the Iran war, I noticed that the vocabulary was arriving faster than the events it was trying to describe.
Every morning there was a new word, or a new version of an old word, or an old word being used in a new way that everyone immediately understood and adopted without anyone deciding to adopt it. The language of the meme war was being coined in public, in real time, by journalists and academics and Twitter posters and government communications offices who were all trying to name the same thing from slightly different angles.
Six weeks into a conflict, a field has a vocabulary. That is not normal. That is the kind of thing that takes years, sometimes decades — a term entering circulation, being contested, being refined, eventually settling. The vocabulary of this war was running at the pace of the war itself. I found this fascinating in the specific way that someone who has been doing this work for three years and has already named most of these things in a notebook finds it fascinating to watch the world catch up.