Get a swatter -- a buzzword’s loose

Forget home sweet home. Try hive sweet hive.

Although you may not think of yourself as an insect, some trend watchers say Americans are behaving more and more like bees at home. Society has switched from “cocooning” (withdrawing from the world) to “hiving,” they say.

Great, we’ve evolved from freakish-looking larvae to pollen-swilling worker bees with multiple eyeballs and 35-day life spans. Then again, despite a flurry of media stories on hiving, the concept has its skeptics.

Grant Barrett, project editor of the “Historical Dictionary of American Slang,” compares hiving to such terms as “NASCAR dad” and “soccer mom.”

“It’s a marketing-driven word used by a consulting firm to demonstrate its supposed grasp of the consumer mind-set,” he says. “To sell their services ... they come up with a new word for an old concept -- or even invent a concept -- and spread it around as new, or hot or fashionable.”

Couldn’t they have invented a concept that is more enticing, like Ritz-Carltoning -- or Hearst Castle-ing? No, we’re stuck imitating bugs.

The rise of hiving is being trumpeted by Yankelovich Partners, a North Carolina company that researches consumer behaviors. In a news release issued last year, Yankelovich described hiving as a trend toward entertaining at home and getting more involved in the community: “Unlike cocooning, a term used to describe how Americans retreated to their homes to disconnect from the rest of the world in the late 1980s, the hiving phenomenon ... connects people.”

This was news to the consultants who dreamed up “cocooning.” “We still use the phrase,” a spokesman for BrainReserve told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel last year. (Nobody at BrainReserve would comment for this story; have they retreated to a media-proof cocoon?)

So, which insect analogy will triumph? Cocooning got a boost when warnings about biochemical warfare had people sealing their homes with duct tape and plastic. But the bee contingent has a long history.

“It’s older than the horseless carriage,” Barrett says.

In 1725, Alexander Pope was the Yankelovich of his time, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. In a letter to a friend, he wrote: “We are ... forc’d to ... get into warmer houses and hive together in cities.”

However, a return to hiving could create problems. For starters, most of us would end up as drones serving a queen bee. We’d also have to learn the whole hive dance thing, which is way more complicated than the Macarena or Electric Slide. And then there’s the killer bee problem just waiting to crash the party.

Maybe we should look for another insect to emulate. We could try ant-hilling, but it involves a lot of heavy lifting. Or maybe spider-webbing, where food is always delivered to your house. The downside, of course, is that the food is not only delivered raw, but also still alive.

Naturally, trendologists are plotting the next insect catchphrase, says Marshal Cohen, chief analyst at the NPD Group, another consumer research firm.

Cohen’s candidate is “butterflying,” a lifestyle trend that will be driven by wireless technology. “It’s going to be about mobility and freedom,” he says. Among other things, butterflying will encompass a desire for more security (freedom from terrorism) and telecommuting (more freedom at work).

It also makes a lot more sense for a butterfly to emerge from a cocoon than a bee.