Excessive use of "porn"

And by that I mean "porn," the quotes signifying using a word as a word, as I was taught.

I've been seeing this word used in a sloppy, journalistic way. In fact, having been a journalist myself, I would not be surprised if journalists created the usage. Or maybe it was the internet…entrepreneurs. For example:

chartporn.com
bookshelfporn.com

But when I checked my New Oxford, I was confronted by a definition that I did not grow up with:

noun
1 pornography.
2 television programs, books, etc., regarded as catering to a voyeuristic or obsessive interest in a specified subject : a thrilling throwback to the golden age of disaster movies—weather porn of the highest order.
adjective
pornographic : a porn video.

An obsessive interest? In anything? Hmm.

When I was a mere lad in the 1970s, I recall seeing ads in the newspaper for X-rated movies, and sometimes XXX movies, which presumably were three times as bad, or better depending on your point of view, as X-rated movies. These ads were usually accompanied by a woman's face in phony ecstasy. I can't remember the last time I saw the use of "X-rated" to denote pornography, the latter being the word I associated with materials of a sexual nature meant to arouse behavior of a sexual nature. Tom Wolfe called the print version "one-hand magazines."

Then there is the use of the term "adult," which raises, so to speak, the question of how one defines an adult. I thought it had something to do with responsiblity, maturing, morality, and so on. At some point it acquired another definition, one's age allowing the freedom to watch the beast with two backs onscreen.

Bookshelf porn. I don't know how books can engage in coitus.

Well, sometimes they are on top of each other…

I know it when I see it.

Have you never heard of food porn?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_porn

Thanks. Now I've got an urge for a stuffed pepper! I've got to go take a cold shower.

Excessive? Me?

No books after three years on this site? Seems odd.

Wouldn't want people to drool over them, or worse.

It reminds me of the overuse of the suffix "gate" for anything which journalists think might be scandalous or corrupt.

There may be a new suffix for that now. I just heard Christie's scandal referred to as Bridgeghazi.

Pornghazi?

Crossing between two threads, This is from NASA:

NASA is inviting people around the world to submit their names to be etched on a microchip aboard a spacecraft headed to the asteroid Bennu in 2016. Yesterday.

Is this genuine, or just a Bennghazi?

>9 barney67:
More considerations here: http://www.librarything.com/topic/167610

The less I share, the less I risk.

I guess if it bothers you that much, don't use the site.

Actually, words have been known to shift in meaning from what we learned forty years ago.

For that matter, the word is derived from the Greek pornographos, ‘writing about prostitutes,’, from pornē ‘prostitute’ + graphein ‘write.’

So, strictly speaking, it's only "porn" if it involves hired professionals.

Amateur-hour stuff - most of what's produced today - therefore is erotica and is not, strictly speaking, "pornography".

But waddya know, the word shifted in meaning from the 19th century to the 1970s. Maybe the language isn't frozen.