NOT AN OPEN CALL FOR ANCHORMAN QUOTES: In my Heroes post, I deleted, as surplusage, a line likening the show to walking through a large, expensive, spec-built house. It looks great, it's tasteful, everything is nicely done, it has extra-large bathrooms and those cool double-drawers in the kitchen, but it just doesn't seem like anybody lives there.
That reminded me of a debate we had on [this blog's predecessor] several years ago and might be worth revisiting now: are there any words more redolent of faint praise than "tasteful" and its more vulgar cousin, "classy"? To me, when a person says tasteful, what it means is "I don't like it, but it looks expensive," or "could have been worse, given your poor taste." When a person says "classy," it means "this is among the nicest emergency rooms/dialysis centers/strip clubs I've ever patronized" (an association perhaps colored by the fact that my old friend Robyn, prompted by this theory, told me that she lived near a strip club called "Bob's Classy Lady").
edited by Adam to enforce the first rule of Fight Club.
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