Fritinancy

On the Visual Thesaurus: The -core corps

My latest column for the Visual Thesaurus looks at the increasingly common -core suffix, which has evolved from descriptions of music and pornography to what’s being termed “aesthetics”: personal style choices, from adventurecore to zombiecore.

Full access to the column is paywalled for three months; here’s a sample.

It was music that pushed -core into new directions. In their “Among the New Words” column in the Summer 2012 issue of American Speech, Ben Zimmer and Charles Carson traced this evolution back to speedcore, which first appeared in 1985. (It refers to hardcore rock music played aggressively at a fast tempo.) They identified a clutch of other musical -cores, including sad core, noise core, deathcore, and nerdcore. In his March 2012 keynote address at the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, Bruce Springsteen wondered aloud at some of these offshoots: “Huh? I just want to know what Nintendo core is, myself.” (Wikipedia has the answer: “a broadly defined style of rock music that most commonly fuses chiptune and video game music with hardcore punk and/or heavy metal.”) The -core suffix “became a way to assign authenticity to a host of new musical genres from rock to dance music to hip-hop,” wrote Britt Peterson in a 2015 Washingtonian article headlined “-Core Is the Suffix of Our Time.” But, Peterson added, “as we discovered grindcore, thrashcore, skacore, breakcore, raggacore, crunkcore, and so on, ‘-core’ lost its hardness—and, in its ubiquity, became a pop-culture wink.”

Read the rest of the column to learn about the vast -core catalog at Aesthetics Wiki. And more!

Zombiecore: “an aesthetic based on the feeling, sensation, and visuals of being a zombie or surviving a zombie apocalypse.” Definition and image via Aesthetics Wiki.

Blog bonuses! I’ve written previously about mumblecore (2007), couplecore (2009), lardcore (2010), mid-core (2013), normcore (2014), and cottagecore (2020). And here’s a new one, via the Guardian: dystopia-core, “which is in direct opposition to ‘dopamine dressing’ – wearing overtly fun clothes to help lift your mood – can be seen as the next step of the grunge and goth revivals.” When the New York Times spotted the proto-trend back in 2018 B.C. (Before Covid), the editors dubbed it “war-core.”

Has -core jumped the shark? At least one person thinks so.

Stop suffixing thinks with -punk and -core, you fucking creepy assed normies with your shitty taste.

— Nolan Void (@HitlerPuncher) January 16, 2022

(Thinks or things? Unclear.)

June linkfest

“Controversial terms, from ‘abortion’ to ‘Zionism,’ tend to shut down dialog because they mean different things to different people.” The AllSides Red Blue Dictionary defines these hot-button terms across the political spectrum: “Until we fully understand what a term means to someone else, we don't know the issue and can't effectively communicate.”

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I’m enjoying (and learning from) the short essays Susan Orlean publishes on Medium, especially her stories about  the writing craft. Here she is on beginnings and on endings.

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After a four-month hiatus I’m back on Medium myself with some reflections on fifteen years of blogging. (And here’s your annoying-but-obligatory reminder that Medium contributors earn money from their stories only if enough people “clap” for them, and that up to 50 claps per story are allowable, nay, encouraged.)

Word of the week: Cottagecore

Around the world, clothing sales have plummeted since mid-March, when shops closed their doors to slow the spread of COVID-19 and “slob-chic” became the order of the day. According to one estimate published in early August, US apparel sales could shrink by as much as 50 percent in 2020.

There was one odd, notable exception: a frilly, glittery, hyperfeminine, wholly impractical pink dress, printed all over with red strawberries, that became “a viral sensation,” according to Glamour reporter Adrienne Matei, with sales spiking 1,000 percent between late July and mid-August. Created by a 24-year-old designer from Kosovo with the lyrical name Lirika Matoshi, “the strawberry dress,” as it became known, costs $490 and has inspired TikTok tributes, anime fan art, and, inevitably, cheap knockoffs on Amazon and Etsy. The dress is “a bright spot in a dark year,” Matei writes: a perfect representation of “one of 2020’s most popular trends: the ‘cottagecore’ aesthetic, a sweetly pastoral paean to the countryside popularized by the internet’s young romantics.”

 

Strawberry-print midi dress by Lirika Matoshi.

Word of the Week: Normcore

Normcore: A fashion trend that embraces “ardently ordinary clothes. Mall clothes. Blank clothes. The kind of dad-brand non-style you might have once associated with Jerry Seinfeld, but transposed on a Cooper Union student with William Gibson glasses.” (The Cut, February 26, 2014) From normal + the -core suffix, originally used in hardcore (1960s, to describe pornography, and 1970s, to denote “harsh, aggressive, or extreme versions of various types of popular music.” (Definition via OED.)

“Tube socks. Lots of ’em.” No. 5 on GQ’s list of “10 Normcore Essentials Every Man Should Have.”

 

Normcore has been enjoying a few minutes of fame thanks in large part to last week’s post on New York magazine’s fashion blog, The Cut. (But the word has been around for almost a decade; keep reading.) Writer Fiona Duncan defined normcore as “self-aware, stylized blandness,” and credited the word’s coinage to K-Hole, a trend-forecasting collective in New York whose members have backgrounds in art and marketing. (K-Hole is also responsible for the neologisms “fragmoretation” and “prolasticity”; its corporate-looking reports include sentences like “Because after you graduate, you realize no one gives a fuck besides your PhD advisor.”)

K-Hole’s “Youth Mode: Acting Basic” report, published in October 2013, called normcore “post-aspirational” and described it enigmatically:

Normcore capitalizes on the possibility of misinterpretation as an opportunity for connection—not as a threat to authenticity.

K-Hole’s definition encompassed a general world view rather than clothing and style. The Cut’s Duncan translated it into fashion brands: “mock turtlenecks with Tevas and Patagonia windbreakers; Uniqlo khakis with New Balance sneakers or Crocs and souvenir-stand baseball caps.”

Duncan’s post struck a chord; articles about normcore quickly appeared in Gawker, Newsday, The Daily Dot, GQ.com, Baeble Music (“A Normcore Playlist for the Most Normal Normsters”), and elsewhere. The online magazine Bustle called normcore “boring fashion for interesting people.” Know Your Meme called it “a humorous fashion trend in which artists and others associated with the“hipster” subculture emulate Middle Americans by wearing ordinary clothing with dull or muted colors.”

Normcore had a pre-K-Hole existence, albeit an obscure and cultish one. According to an Urban Dictionary entry published in March 2009, “normcore” first appeared in the webcomic Templar, Arizona, which launched in May 2005. The UD entry defines normcore as:

A subculture based on conscious, artificial adoption of things that are in widespread use, proven to be acceptable, or otherwise inoffensive. Ultra-conformists.

Oh, shee-it! You just got gang signed by the worst of ’em! Y'see the slight forward tilt of the chin, and the causal “hey” with the silent H? That means he’s NORMCORE. Dangerously regular. Dresses only in T-shirts and jeans, uses slang appropriated from other subcultures, but only 3 years after its first use, an’ only after it's been used in a sitcom.

 

Other -cores previously featured on Fritinancy: mumblecore, couplecore, lardcore.

Word of the Week: Mid-core

Mid-core: In gaming, a category between “casual” and “hardcore.”

“What the hell does ‘mid-core’ mean anyway?” Gamasutra contributor Kris Graft (a pseudonym?) asked in January of this year:

Months ago, we started seeing the emergence of the term “mid-core.” Some say it's the future of mobile and social games. Big companies are acquiring “mid-core” developers to capture the “mid-core” audience. Game studios are creating games aimed at the “mid-core.”

Gamasutra asked its readers and the Twittersphere to supply a definition. Here are some of the responses (n.b.: In gaming, “AAA” refers to games developed for major platforms with large marketing budgets):

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(1) Hardcore arranges their schedules around their gaming.
(2) Mid-core arranges their gaming around their daily schedule.
(3) Casual entertains self with games when time presents itself.

-- Tony Goodman, founder, PeopleFun

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A core game along existing genre tropes, but with short-form narrative potential and the ability to support short & long sessions

— Raphael van Lierop (@RaphLife) December 10, 2012

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I prefer the term @jaimewoo had for it: 'Softcore Gaming'.

— Jen Harrison (@jennofour) December 10, 2012

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Above Zynga/casual games, but below AAA titles like Dishonored or Crysis 3.

— Becky Taylor (@omglazerkittens) December 10, 2012

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I’d prefer it to be called goldilocks-core.
No one really has a clue what it is, but it’s “just right”. – Aaron Steed, in the comments section

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Hat tip to Neal Whitman, whose most recent Visual Thesaurus column is about the evolution of “hardcore” and the many uses of the “-core” suffix.

Related: See my posts on mumblecore, lardcore, and couplecore.

Word of the Week: Lardcore

Lardcore: “Southern food with hard-core attitude.” — Josh Ozersky in Time magazine, Oct. 27, 2010. Coined from lard and hardcore.

From Ozersky’s article:

But a slew of young chefs are taking modern Southern cooking to a new place, forming a movement in the crucible of high ideals, virtuoso technique and hard-core attitude. Call it lardcore. It’s meticulous, it’s ballsy and it doesn’t care what you think of it. In that, it’s very Southern.

(Digression: meticulous and ballsy make an interesting pairing.)

Ozersky continues:

Typically, lardcore features unapologetically low-rent proteins like pork jowls and catfish, and treats them the way Paul Bocuse treated foie gras. John Besh, of August restaurant in New Orleans, does with mudbugs, a.k.a. lowly crawfish, what Eric Ripert does with uni (sea urchin) or Dover sole; Linton Hopkins, at Restaurant Eugene in Atlanta, serves an even more amazing cured-flounder tartare. (Who ever heard of flounder tartare?) Their food comes in small but potent portions, and is sourced with an almost Shinto-like regard for natural integrity. So pure of heart are many of these cutting-edge restaurants that they don't even bother with fried chicken; they know that if they don’t have time to do it in a cast-iron pan filled with lard, it’s not worth doing. So they leave it for the meat-and-three joints that dot the Southland’s strip malls.

(A digression on Southland: in the Los Angeles area, the term is used by journalists to mean “greater Southern California.”)

Ozersky later calls lardcore “locavorism on steroids.” Locavore was the New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year.

The Charleston City Paper quickly took note of lardcore, calling it “the food word of the year.”

New words formed with the –core suffix are fairly common, but most of them identify musical genres (from “hardcore rock”). See, for example, couplecore, a former Word of the Week. There are also movie –cores, such as mumblecore. Other –core compounds include:

Yardcore: Jamaican hardcore

Metalcore: A fusion of hardcore rock and heavy metal.

Mathcore: Rhythmically complex metalcore.

Nerdcore: A genre of hip-hop characterized by themes of interest to nerds, such as “Star Trek.”

Gothcore: A fusion of hardcore rock and death/goth/horror punk.

Following that formula, lardcore could refer to, say, songs about Krispy Kreme and Piggly Wiggly; or it could signify rock and roll performed by obese musicians. (As it happens, there is a British band called Lardcore; according to its MySpace page, the band was formed in early 2006. No explanation is given for the name.)

The lardcore.com domain belongs to an “adult” website that features corpulent protagonists; this usage reflects on an early meaning of hardcore: a style of pornographic film.

Read more about the –core extension in the Snowclones database, where author Erin O’Connor writes:

When the -core affix is attached to a word, it is meant to apply the “militant, fiercely loyal” sense of hardcore to that word.

Hat tip for the lardcore citation: Ben Zimmer on the American Dialect Society listserv.

Word of the Week: Couplecore

Couplecore: Indie rock centered on a romantic pair.

From the New York Times pop music listings, April 17, 2009:

THE ROSEBUDS (Sunday) It’s been called “couplecore”: indie-rock bands centered on a romantic pair. Over nostalgic synth-pop, Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp of the Rosebuds mix mushy sentiments with thoughts about adult responsibilities and the long challenge of staying happy together.

The -core suffix comes from the vocabulary of movies (hardcore, softcore); it recently spawned mumblecore. It has migrated successfully to music, thanks to the naming of genres such as "hardcore punk." In addition to couplecore, see nerdcore, metalcore, and grindcore.

Word of the Week: Mumblecore

Mumblecore: An early-21st-century independent film movement. Mumblecore films are populated by characters in their late teens and early twenties who have difficulty expressing their confusion about love, work, and life in general (hence "mumble"; the -core suffix is most likely a nod to hard-core and soft-core). Practitioners of mumblecore (also spelled with a capital m) are sometimes called the mumblecorps.

In "A Generation Finds Its Mumble," New York Times arts writer Dennis Lim identifies Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha-Ha (2002) as "the film that kicked off the mumblecore wave." Other films in the genre include Aaron Katz's Dance Party USA (2006) and Quiet City (2007) and Jay and Mark Duplass's The Puffy Chair. Lim writes that "mumblecore" was coined during the 2005 South by Southwest Film Festival by  Bujalski's sound mixer, Eric Masunaga.

For more on mumblecore, see this article in IndieFilmPedia.

Update: Erin discusses -core as a snowclone morpheme on her blog, Snowclones.org.