Movie insiders use the term neutrally, but surely few outside the business can say the words with a straight face?

You look away for a second and yet another decent word gets rammed through the meaning mincer.

Have you seen Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F yet? Reviews are mixed. The Radio Times thought it a “fun legacy sequel”. Slant ventured “entertaining legacy sequel”. The Wrap argued “the heat is off in Netflix’s generic legacy sequel”. I did not – because I’d rather chew off my own fingers and feed them to the cat – use the words “legacy sequel” in my lukewarm review for this publication.

There is a chance you saw that three-star notice. After all, by at least starting this column, you have confirmed you are still attached to “legacy media”. That is how we describe the media that ruled before the rise of the internet: newspapers, movies, physical copies of video and audio, radio, linear television. We could have a debate as to whether Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F – third sequel to a film that emerged in Ronald Reagan’s second term – qualifies or not (it’s on Netflix), but if we did that I may end up also chewing off all my toes.

Maybe you were too busy attending a gig by your favourite “legacy act” to note the arrival of that Eddie Murphy vehicle. Definitions are a bit slippery here. Nobody seems sure when the curtain comes down. Bruce Springsteen, in his 70s, certainly counts. Have Suede and The Manic Street Preachers, who played Dublin last week, gained entry into the legacy camp? You wouldn’t think it to look at Brett Anderson’s stiletto cheekbones but, incredibly, the Suede frontman has celebrated his 56th birthday. So maybe they’re within the corral.

Why has it been deemed necessary to do this to a perfectly harmless word with a hitherto unambiguous meaning? Is it meant kindly or disrespectfully?

As you won’t need to be told, “legacy” describes any entity that is passed down by an antecedent or living predecessor. That gets at the venerable origins of each category above. Beverly Hills Cop came out in 1984. The Irish Times was first published in 1859. Bruce Springsteen was born in 1949. But a “legacy” changes hands. Shouldn’t the word apply as much to the successors as the originators? We could thus cheekily describe Charli XCX, who has acknowledged a debt to the sexagenarian Siouxsie Sioux, a sort of legacy act. Right?

Scarlett Johansson has acknowledged her participation in a “legacy sequel” to the 31-year-old Jurassic Park

To be less facetious, the term’s evolution (devolution?) indicates a conflict in contemporary culture and technology. At no time has media gone through so many revolutions. CDs gave way to downloading, which gave way to streaming. A similar shift happened in TV and film. A once insular western pop-culture now opens itself to influences from as far afield as China and Korea. Yet, at the same time, no successful cultural entity is prepared to go away. Never mind those fulminating in 1960s Sunday supplements about the Beatles and the Rolling Stones; the artists themselves can scarcely have believed they’d still be attracting attention as the first quarter of the 21st century draws to a close. We have already, this summer, seen another “legacy sequel” to the 40-year-old Ghostbusters. A “legacy sequel” to the 29-year-old Twister is nearly upon us. Scarlett Johansson has acknowledged her participation in a “legacy sequel” to the 31-year-old Jurassic Park. The transmogrified word acknowledges a too-stubborn adhesion to familiar shapes and sounds as successive technological cyclones throw the culture into ever greater commotion.

To address the question above: no, the word is not always, in its current reframed state, meant kindly. When it comes to newspapers, TV and radio, many on both right and left are happy to gob up the phrase “legacy media” as if expelling so much unwanted phlegm. The picture conjured up is – to employ the arsenal of Victorian cartoonists – of elderly fat cats in top hats sleeping on piles of ill-deserved cash. As if the unregulated online alternatives are better. Movie insiders use “legacy sequel” neutrally, but few outside the business can, surely, say the words with a straight face.

There is something here of the patronising description of older people as “seniors”. You really get that with the musicians. “Legacy” is seen as a “nice” way of describing Neil Young or Bob Dylan or Joni Mitchell. Sod nice. That’s not how it was when they started out. The writer David Quantick recently happened upon a 1980 copy of the NME that monstered Kate Bush’s then-new LP Never for Ever. “What I love about this spread is the lack of reverence for what we now have to call Legacy Acts,” he wrote. “I like all these albums, but it’s great to see a world where you could slag off Breathing.” He meant a then-recent Bush single, but he could have meant the act of respiration. How gutless our language has become.