Euphemisms for the sacred name

Pious Jews will not pronounce the names of God. I have read, too, that the word bruin originated as a euphemism for bear, substituting a quality (the color brown) for the whole, whose name was too fearsome to be uttered. Nor, I learned this evening, will an Apple store employee utter the name of Steve Jobs.

I visited the store because my computer's flimsy power adapter had predictably cracked, frayed, and stopped working after less than two years, and I had to pay eighty-five dollars for a replacement. (Apple would have replaced the adapter free — had I paid $249 for an AppleCare protection plan. Technology is not the only area in which Jobs was a genius.)

This led to a civil discussion with the clerk who sold me the adapter. I pointed out what a smart business practice it was to sell shoddy — and proprietary — but necessary extras for expensive computers. As outrageous as it is to charge eighty-five dollars for a power cord, what choice do buyers have, once they've already spent hundreds or thousands for the machine? Apple computers take only Apple cords; the company would be a fool to make a sturdier cord and charge a reasonable price for it.

I mentioned Jobs to the clerk, a rueful tribute to the founder's business acumen as well as his engineering smarts. And the clerk replied: "As you said about our late boss ... "  The juxtaposition of the familiar our with the substitution of the epithet boss for Jobs' name was creepily similar to the way monotheistic religions refer to God.

One amusing note: The clerk asked where I'd heard that Apple power cords tend to break. "From a friend in a café," I said.

"A friend in a café," he repeated, his right eyebrow rising.  The irony of an Apple employee displaying disdain for café habitués was almost worth the eighty-five dollars I had to pay for a ten-dollar power cord. Count the number of Apple laptops the next time you visit a café. You'll see what I mean.

***

The number of hits I got searching for Apple and worship is scary. Any number of people, presumably some of them at least half-serious, detect parallels with religion in the fervor of Apple product worship. I do not find this reassuring.

In what ways is Apple/Steve Jobs worship like a religion? Like a cult? How is it different?

© Peter Rozovsky 2013