Newly Corporate

Here’s a good word to know: Zeitgeist. Thanks to the internet, this word steadily making its way into everyday discussions at work. The word was originally a German expression meaning “the spirit of the age”. But last year Google started an official zeitgeist. It is a list of all the top searches on Google for a given period of time. The theory is that we can get a sense for the spirit of our age if we see what people are searching for on Google. So a zeitgeist is a way to articulate what’s important in our social world. It illustrates the cultural climate. It is anything that can take a snapshot and summarize what is important or interesting to we humans on this planet. It is like a management dashboard for cultural trends.

So, how do you use it in a sentence? Here’s a couple examples…

If you want to sell a product, you’ll have to have a good handle on your target market’s zeitgeist – Dan (me)

Opinions, that deviate from the ruling zeitgeist, always aggravate the crowd. – Germaine de Staël (Wikipedia)