User:Scorpio1939/CharismaPopUsage

Popular Usage

As described in the History section above, personality charisma derived from divinely conferred charisma. The Social Sciences section describes how scholars in those disciplines define the term, usually consistent with the personality charisma sense defined above. "During the 1950s the term suddenly achieved wide use to describe a person of great personal appeal and charm." Since then, "charisma has a secure place in everyday discourse." Revived from its deep theological obscurity (the term had barely been mentioned for centuries), the concept of charisma has become generalized and a commonplace description, applied to political leaders, businessmen, actors, celebrities, and so forth. By the mid-1980's lexicographers considered charisma a vogue word; that is, a word "that suddenly and inexplicably crops up repeatedly" in speeches of bureaucrats, comments of columnists, and in hundreds of radio and television broadcasts. At times before the mid-1980s, and increasingly since, personality charisma has referred to persons, objects, and even desired images.

A search on "charisma" across Wikipedia articles shows the wide range of personality charisma uses, not only in the United States but worldwide. “Charisma” is the name of a 1966 record album, an English 1970s and '80s record label, a New Zealand eventing horse whose rider won successive Olympic Gold Medals in the 1980s, an Illinois middle school show choir, a Japanese film, an episode title in a long-running TV series, a character in another, an American actress, a Serbian hard rock band, a 2008 Japanese singles record, and a cultivated elm hybrid. In addition, Drive Through Charisma is a 1993 album by an Australian rock band, Charismatic is horse that challenged for the Triple Crown in 1999, Charisma Man is a fictional character in a comic strip of the same name, Afterschool Charisma is a serialized Japanese comic for young men, Charisma Doll a comic for Japanese teens, Escaping Charisma is a 2006 South Korean film, Angel Charisma Carter is an American aspiring model, and Scotty Charisma and Captain Charisma are ring names for two American professional wrestlers.

These widely varied examples illustrate that the meaning of charisma has become greatly diffused from its original divinely conferred meaning, and even from the personality charisma meaning in modern English dictionaries. John Potts, who has extensively analyzed the term's history, sums up meanings beneath this diffused common usage.

Contemporary charisma maintains, however, the irreducible character ascribed to it by Weber: it retains a mysterious, elusive quality. Media commentators regularly describe charisma as the 'X-factor'. …The enigmatic character of charisma also suggests a connection – at least to some degree – to the earliest manifestations of charisma as a spiritual gift.