Blazerati: Officials of amateur sports associations who are identified by their colored blazers. Formed from blazer + -ati, a Latin plural suffix seen in literati (men and women of letters) and illuminati (enlightened ones; free-thinkers). Sometimes capitalized. Singular form: blazerato.
Blazerati was first documented in 1998 (source: 20th Century Words). By then the English-speaking world had grown accustomed to literati spinoffs such as glitterati (celebrities; earliest citation in a 1956 issue of Time magazine) and digerati (the elite of the computer and online industries, 1998). In 2008, Stephen Baker published a nonfiction book, The Numerati, about the sometimes dark uses of data capture and analysis.
The first and (so far) only appearance of blazerati in the New York Times occurred in a May 28 article about preparations for this summer’s Olympic Games in London:
John Biggs, a member of the London Assembly who represents East London, said he was most annoyed about the V.I.P. road lanes, which he said would cater to fancy-jacket-wearing “Blazerati,” at the expense of regular Londoners.
The term is much more common in the UK and Commonwealth countries than in the United States, and is almost always used disparagingly. In a 2001 book, Amateurism in Sport: An Analysis and Defence, British sports academic Lincoln Allison wrote caustically about the blazerati:
[T]he introduction of the term ‘blazerato’ and its plural must be accompanied by a certain amount of conceptual and political caution. The ‘blazerati’ are, literally, those who wear blazers, more generally, officials of broadly based sports associations. It is natural to associate them with the amateur ethos; they are, for the most part, unpaid and part of their role is normally to represent the interest of their sport as a whole against the interests of commerce. But it would be quite wrong to allow the assumption that the blazerato therefore represents the interests of amateurism in any morally significant sense. A model derived from public choice theory which suggests that men in blazers will be mainly interested in their own status and self-preservation seems to work all too well. It is the corruption of the blazerati which has done more to denigrate the image of the Olympics than anything else.
(Source: Google Books.)
Tidy Cats, Fresh Step, Arm & Hammer.
Which is best?
Ask The Litterati.
Posted by: Dan Freiberg | June 04, 2012 at 11:11 AM