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.)

Words of the year 2021: Fritinancy edition

Covid-19 turned into Covid 2021, the U.S. presidency changed hands despite TFG’s efforts to the contrary, and we somehow summoned the energy to invent new words and repurpose old ones. Here are my picks for this year’s keywords; scroll to the bottom for previous years’ lists. And stay tuned for the American Dialect Society’s selection of the word of the year on January 7.

My criteria are the ADS’s: words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2021. 

In alphabetical order:

Word of the week: Revenge dress

Revenge dress was all over the celebrity/entertainment news last week, capping a year notable for its revenge compounds.

Name in the news: Shein

Here’s a statistic that surprised even me, a follower of fashion and retail trends: The most downloaded shopping app in the U.S. in May 2021 was not Amazon. It was Shein, an online-only retailer of cheap fast fashion for women and men (plus beauty products, plus home products) founded in 2008 in Nanjing, China, by Chris Xu, a search-engine-optimization specialist with no previous experience in fashion or retail.

Today, Shein (often styled as SHEIN) is a “quindecacorn”*—its gross merchandise volume is worth US$15 billion—and it’s forecast to surpass $20 billion in volume by the end of 2021. The word “juggernaut” comes up frequently in coverage of the company, which has achieved its numbers by targeting the mostly female tween, teen, and early-20s members of Generation Z who can’t resist buying tops and dresses for as little as $5 (and posting about their “hauls” on social media) and who eagerly anticipate Shein’s monthly roster of designer collaborations.

Still from a Shein “haul video” posted in December 2020 by Instagrammer Fabienne Pelaud, who struggles with the pronunciation of “Shein.”

 

Word of the week: Shacket

Fashion loves hybrids—jeans as tight as leggings! shorts that look like a skirt!—and fashionspeak loves hybrid descriptors, also known as portmanteaus. Thus: jeggings (first use in print: 2009) and skort (1951), not to mention athleisure (1995), flatforms (2010?), and cardi-coat (date unknown). (More fashmanteaus here.) This year we’ve been hearing a lot about the shacket (“the cutest way to stay comfortable in between seasons”—Stylecaster; “a must-have”--Narcity), a blend of shirt and jacket that sounds like it ought to describe a petite shack. It’s newly trendy but not really new at all.

Women’ shackets by Dickies and BB Dakota, Nordstrom, September 2021.

 

Women’ shackets by Dickies and BB Dakota, Nordstrom, September 2021.

 

Women’ shackets by Dickies and BB Dakota, Nordstrom, September 2021.

 

July linkfest

I haven’t recommended a book in a while, so this month I’m recommending two, both of them new, both of them about language. (And each one blurbed by the author of the other one, which must be a coincidence, right?)

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.”

*

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.

*

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: Deadstock

An April 22 Instagram post from Carol Young | Undesigned, a boutique in Los Angeles’s Los Feliz neighborhood:

Happy Earth Day! We try to make everyday [sic] earth day here, using designer dead stock fabrics and organic fabrics since launching the line in 2003.

On the shop’s website, you’ll find shoes made of “leather salvaged from dead stock inventory.”

What is deadstock (or dead stock)? Several things, depending on where you live and what you’re selling.

23 cows struck by lightning in northern Texas, September 2019.

Deceased cattle may technically qualify as “dead stock,” but on a ranch or farm, deadstock is the opposite of livestock in a different way: It refers to equipment and implements.

 

The deadstock on Carol Young’s site is “dead” in the sense of “previously manufactured but unused.” Here’s an excerpt from a deadstock explainer published in September 2019 by Techpacker, a Brooklyn company that helps companies make samples quickly:

Deadstock fabrics are textiles which are sitting around as leftovers and are not part of a plan for immediate or future use. For example, it could be the leftover fabric of a fashion brand’s collection or it could also refer to unused textiles from movie sets or fabric mills.

Deadstock fabric is also known as overstock, surplus or jobber fabric; they all mean the same thing.

This sense of deadstock has been in use for centuries. Here’s the relevant entry (under dead) in OED:

c. Of goods: Lying unsold, unsaleable, for which there is no market.

1670   J. Dryden Tyrannick Love v. i. 64   And all your Goods lie dead upon your hand.

1681   R. Knox Hist. Relation Ceylon 146   And now Caps were become a very dead Commodity.

1879   C. Hibbs in Cassell's Techn. Educator IV. 263/2   A large quantity of finished articles lying as dead stock in the market.

In the niche market of athletic-shoe collecting, however, deadstock has a different and specific meaning that began emerging in the early 2000s. A June 2005 Urban Dictionary entry gives a terse definition:

Brand New. Never worn, Never Tried and would usually include a box for the shoes.

Unlike deadstock fabrics, which may have been sitting unremembered for years in a musty warehouse, deadstock shoes are often bought with the intention of future resale at a profit.

 

“Deadstock Jordan’s [sic] whatthe4s size 9.5 never tried on once. 1000% authentic with receipt from Nike;” $375 on the resale site Poshmark.. Does anyone else get a strong “For sale: baby shoes, never worn” vibe from this?

 

Adam Bluestein wrote about the phenomenon in a March 2, 2021, article for Marker:

Analysts predict the global sneaker resale market will reach $30 billion by 2030; last summer investment bank Cowen estimated the U.S. resale market was worth $2 billion in North America alone. Apart from Supreme, the hottest merch “collab” (usually indicated with an “x,” for example, Supreme x Comme des Garçons) a brand can score is with Nike (Adidas comes in second). Unworn Jordans, Airs, and Dunks — called “deadstock” — are the gold standard of the resale economy — and, really, as liquid and versatile a global currency as a U.S. dollar or a euro, “a bona fide asset class” as Bloomberg Businessweek put it recently. In marketplaces like StockX — founded in 2015 and now valued at over $1 billion — Stadium Goods, and GOAT a valuation of any given shoe can be obtained instantly.

Hat tip to Colin Morris, who posted the Marker link on the ADS-L listserv. He also found an 1897 instance of deadstock being applied to unsold clothing offered for resale in Laotian shops: “felt hats of various antiquated shapes, hard and soft, the deadstock of the shops of Bombay, Calcutta and London.”

Words of the year 2020: Fritinancy edition

 COVID, COVID, COVID, impeachment, COVID.

Just kidding. Sort of.

Yes, 2020 was the year in which Donald J. Trump was impeached by the US Senate House of Representatives. It was also the year in which he was soundly defeated at the polls by Joe Biden, although as of this writing his legal shenanigans and email grifting continue unabated, as I expect they will until Biden is sworn in on January 20, 2021.

But the impeachment took place in January and February, and in March everything changed thanks to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which has influenced our behavior and our language in ways we couldn’t have anticipated in early 2020. My list this year reflects many of those new COVID-inspired terms, but it also makes room for fashion and politics. Like the American Dialect Society, I give preference to words (or “lexical items”—acronyms and phrases appear here, too) that were new or newly prominent, widely used, and relevant to events of 2020. I’m also interested in words that were linguistically productive: capable of generating creative coinages.

By the way, this is my twelfth consecutive year of posting words of the year. I’m kind of shocked myself.

In alphabetical order, then:

November linkfest

It’s Word of the Year season, and two British dictionaries are leading the pack. Collins picked lockdown – a word we threw around here in the US but never experienced the way they did in the UK and elsewhere. (A friend of mine is literally confined to her London apartment after spending a month in France: she can’t go outdoors at all.) And Oxford Languages, publisher of the Oxford dictionaries, chose a phenomenon instead of a single word: the impact of the COVID-19 on language. “What struck the team as most distinctive in 2020 was the sheer scale and scope of change,” Katherine Connor Martin, the company’s head of product, told the New York Times’s Jennifer Schuessler. “This event was experienced globally and by its nature changed the way we express every other thing that happened this year.”

“Social distance”: sign in an Oakland produce-store window, May 2020.