(FORTUNE Magazine) – Blame Nike. Brannon Cashion certainly does. A senior vice president at branding and design firm Addison Whitney, Cashion sees Nike as the culprit behind just the latest oversold Internet-era trend: the proliferation of "swooshes"--the rings of Saturn--that adorn so many corporate logos.

Nike's logo was a key element in the company's development as a brand and is an enduring symbol of cool. The original swoosh has become so iconic that ads rarely even mention the name Nike anymore. And though the sneaker company has lost much of its cachet, its symbol continues to resonate. Clients come to him, Cashion says, and say they want "to be Nike on the Net--they want to have that swoosh."

Even designers who don't tie the swoosh phenomenon to Nike--Steven Douglas, the creative director of the Logo Factory, a six-person firm that has done hundreds of swoosh logos, sees it as just a "total lemming thing"--are spending their days slapping it on their clients' logos. The practice has become so widespread that it has inspired Websites filled with anguished cris de coeur about the swooshization of logos (for example, http://50cups.com/rings/rings.html) and filled with countless examples.

Just what is this ubiquitous symbol intended to represent, anyway? "The swoosh conveys a global reach, impact," says Cashion. "You see the circles, they mean full offerings, full spectrums." Adds Jonathan Sacks, CEO of Vanteon, a Nortel spinoff and a swoosh-bedecked client of Addison Whitney's: "It invokes a high-tech feeling. It evokes both high technology and continuity. It works for us."

The current generation of swooshes is wrapped around names in ever more inventive ways, beginning with just a faint arc that hovers above and behind the name (Vanteon's is a good example) and including double swooshes that intersect (Open Market), swooshes that dot the i in the name (Ameritech), and even planets circled by the swoosh (EarthLink).

It's not surprising that high-tech companies would cast themselves as futuristic. But plenty of low-tech operations have appropriated the look too. The logos for Burger King, Wonderbread, and even Al Gore's presidential campaign all sport some version of the ring. Just as the tech startups were apparently trying to trade on Nike's perceived coolness, these brands appear to be trying to trade on the associations with startups and their perceived coolness to paint themselves as cutting edge with just the click of a mouse.

"The dot-coms think, 'If we have a cool logo, then we automatically have a cool brand,' " says Cashion. "Most of the time we deal with technology guys. They're not necessarily marketing savvy."

But they know what they like, and they like the swooshes. This drives designers, especially, nuts. Clients "want to look like everybody else," says Cashion. "They think, 'I want to be recognized. That looks like something I've seen before, so my customers will have seen it before.' " Adds Douglas: "The argument against it is that everybody is doing it. It's hideously boring."