As is typical of our time, over the past few months, many newscasters have used the words apocalypse or apocalyptic to evoke the negative implications of events as diverse as the threat of Grexit, music streaming wars, an asteroid threat, the American housing market, the migrant crisis, the continuing war in Syria and the negative state of the world more generally. Not to mention the flurry of posts which have appeared about upcoming instalment in the highly successful X-Men franchise, X Men: Apocalypse or our obsession with zombies.
We have reached a point where apocalyptic vocabulary litters writing, where Armageddon, the Four Horsemen, the Antichrist and many other words and phrases also lifted from the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation (or the Apocalypse as it is sometimes known), are used as a sort of shorthand for the calamitous times that we live in. In a way it is understandable: in a world of 24-hour news media, headlines have had to reach fever pitch in order to grab readers’ attention. Referencing the “end of the world” is, seemingly, the only thing that will suffice.
