What's today's trendiest term for a calamity? Forget "train wreck," "meltdown," "hot mess" and "epic fail." It's "dumpster fire."

After smoldering quietly among sportswriters for the last eight years, "dumpster fire" has roared to life this summer, spewing bright orange flames and belching thick black smoke. And, just as with a raging dumpster fire, we simply can't take our eyes — or mouths, pens or keyboards — off it.

Journalists, sportscasters and bloggers have applied the term to everything from the economy ("May's job report was a dumpster fire"), to entertainment ("the complete and utter dumpster fire that was 'Batman v Superman'"), to sports ("Calling the Cleveland Browns a 'dumpster fire' is offensive to dumpster fires"), to politics ("This election has turned America into a giant dumpster fire").

And, when a presidential candidate with orange hair, fiery speeches and a nickname rhyming with "dumpster" runs an explosive but slightly comical campaign, the metaphor is irresistible: "Donald Trump's campaign is a raging dumpster fire" (Salon), "Ted Cruz pours gasoline on the Trumpster fire" (The American Prospect).

Perhaps the slyest political use of the term came in July when a spokesman for Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., said that, instead of attending the Republican convention, Sasse would "take his kids to watch some dumpster fires across the state, all of which enjoy more popularity than the current front-runners." Ouch.

So who ignited this phrase?

Merrill Perlman of the Columbia Journalism Review traces its first metaphoric use to a July 2008 post on the blog Scholars and Rogues: "This whole dumpster fire is bad for progressives." Later that year, the phrase started flaring up in sports stories, e.g., "Their bullpen is a dumpster fire."

"Dumpster fire" is indeed a vivid metaphor, but a metaphor for what?

Because a dumpster fire often burns for a while, it clearly denotes an ongoing, extended event as well as evoking the noxious sleaziness associated with black smoke, garbage and back alleys.

But, as eye-catching and odious as a dumpster fire is, it's usually a controllable and slightly amusing conflagration that often simply burns itself out. So perhaps we shouldn't be using it to describe an utter catastrophe.

For that kind of disaster, a headline on the Raw Story website has fired up a new metaphor: "Trump's campaign has gone from a raging dumpster fire to a landfill inferno."

Rob Kyff, a teacher and writer in West Hartford, Conn., invites your language sightings. Send your reports of misuse and abuse, as well as examples of good writing, via e-mail to Wordguy@aol.com or by regular mail to Rob Kyff, Creators Syndicate, 737 3rd Street, Hermosa Beach, CA 90254.