Postmodernism has its origins in the erudite practices of the academic and scholarly world, where new ideas are generated regularly, contested and advanced through the commerce of publishing, hobnobbing at academic conferences, power politicking at faculty meetings and on department budget committees—all processes which are driven by academics' desire to expand personal influence by thinking of something new to say. Beginning in the early 1980s, postmodernism began to emerge as a vanguard movement in the idea market, with all the equipment for a successful intellectual coup—its own fancy vocabulary, a cryptic set of canonical texts, and a seemingly inexhaustible ability to come off cleverer than any of its challengers. Indeed, the ability of the postmodern rhetorician to inflate the significance of familiar issues by describing them with thick jargon has proven a fruitful intellectual stratagem for postmodernists, one whose success rivals that enjoyed by structural functionalist sociologists of the 1950s who, under the leadership of Talcott Parsons, stormed American sociology in a whirlwind of technical sounding lingo.
By the 1990s, the term "postmodern" had crept into the vernacular of American cultural commentary, in much the way that such terms as "existential angst," "mass culture," and "the medium is the message" once held sway over their own distinct periods, promising the key theoretical and rhetorical tools for unlocking the social and cultural mysteries of their time.
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