EVERY so often in the US, like cicadas, a buzzword emerges from the popular dialect and becomes omnipresent in the media lexicon. In the early aughts, the word “nuanced” exploded across the cultural landscape to excuse a politician who couldn’t speak straight or a writer who couldn’t write. In 2004, Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry called his ever-shifting position on the war in Iraq “nuanced” as a way of explaining why he was for it before he was against it. Since then, virtually every politician adopted a “nuanced” position on major issues until, finally, George W. Bush proclaimed “I don’t do nuance.”