Rhetorical tropes that need to go on hiatus

1) "If you type {subject of essay} into Google, you get {some monstrously large number of hits! So many that if every hit was a penny, and you stacked them all on top of each other, the stack would reach the moon! And you'd be a billionaire with a bridge to the moon! That many!}. Therefore, {subject of essay} is clearly a {potent cultural force/hot new trend/growing cause of concern}, requiring a few thousand more words of exposition!" While number of Google hits probably does provide some general measure of societal interest in a topic, any results are going to be seriously skewed by how common the individual words in the search string are, whether the search string is associated with an obsessive subculture, and whether the search string relates to a phenomenon recent enough to have left a noticeable internet footprint. Moreover, the deeper reaches of Google's results can be bizarrely tangential to the original query. Searching for "starting a small business in mobile alabama," for instance, returns 275,000 results - but result #23 is about an Al Jazeera public relations effort, #56 is information about using Red Hat Linux, #57 describes a summit on Cuba, #75 is a newspaper obituary page, #84 a list of poker tips and #95 an article on "kick-starting the mobile Internet." Citing the number of Google hits for a given term is the lifestyle essay equivalent of starting a school paper with a dictionary definition: it makes a feint at gravitas without actually achieving it.

2) And speaking of student papers, my current bugbears are the "Since the dawn of time..." or "It is human nature to..." openings. God knows I've used these plenty of times myself, but part of my current mission as a teacher is to convince students that it's okay to write about some period or event without drawing conclusions that are equally valid for all places, times and people. Really, it's fine to just make an argument about the causes of the first world war, or the social consequences of the Industrial Revolution - you don't need to shoulder the burden of proving that man has always participated in unstable networks of overlapping alliances, or that one of the eternal struggles of human existence is the conflict between cottage industry and mechanized production. As with references to numbers of Google hits, claims of timelessness are attractive because they seem to create a requisite atmosphere of "seriousness" - my hope is to convince students that real seriousness in historical writing starts with humility about what can be known and demonstrated. (Of course, in grad school you also find out that it's possible to swing too far in that direction, until you reach the point where writing a simple declarative sentence becomes an agonizing and almost impossible task...but one step at a time, one step at a time.)