The decade in pictures, for real

Readers of the NYT have documented the decade with their own photos, and I was shocked to see how selective everyone's memory is. Only the really destructive stuff made the cut, with 9/11 and the recession sharing top honors, although the tsunami and Hurricane Katrina made a decent showing too. We all forgot about 9/11 by about two years later, and it took even less time for the latter two to fade from our concern because there's simply no point in forever worrying about freak accidents beyond our control.

It's only since the recession hit and put everyone in a funk that they've revised the history of the past decade, as though our minds weren't possessed by that heady euphoria of circa 2003 to 2007. Just because you wake up from a dream doesn't mean that it was really a nightmare. Preserving that thread would have actually made the narrative make more sense -- if people in 3 million years have only those pictures to go by, they'll wonder where the hell the recession came from. There is apparently no back-story; it just struck out of the blue like Katrina. No panoramic shots of McMansions crowding each other out of a cul-de-sac? No hoodrat driving her gold-toothed boyfriend around in an SUV with rims? No teenagers with scene hair making the duckface for their digital cameras while walking the hallways of their revamped and pimped-out high school buildings? I mean, where were you people?

So, to provide a partial corrective to the Shit Happens school of photojournalism, I've put together some of my pictures that hopefully preserve better the feel of the middle five years of the decade. The readers who submitted their work to the NYT obviously take better pictures than I do, not the least for not employing lame Photoshop tricks -- but I like to think that captures the palpable excitement that everyone suddenly had for design, even the crudest dilettantes. There are no Big Events because we get over them so quickly, unless it's prolonged like the recession has been. While there is no overarching narrative that I'm shoe-horning everything into, I did try to fit them into patterns. Click images to enlarge.


[Genoa salami with goat cheese and red pear, prosciutto with Brie and apricot preserves, tuna on a baguette rubbed with tomato and olive oil]

Long-term changes in the food industry toward competition based more on variety and quality than on price led to ordinary people obsessing over food. (I missed out on the low-carb craze when it first hit, but I'm catching up now.) Although reality TV as a whole was forgettable, the food and cooking shows got us permanently hooked on variety and quality. Unlike the housing market, the market for good food has not collapsed.


[A large cat shading himself in summer, then stealing someone's bed, two views of the Mall in DC during the Cherry Blossom Festival]

No deep story here. Just a reminder that, despite the gloomy reporting, every spring and summer we escaped from our houses to have fun in the sunny weather.


[Snowy views of Montgomery County, Maryland]

And even in less favorable weather, we still avoided cabin fever by traipsing around in the snow to enjoy the look of winter.


[Male fashion during 2004 - 2007]

After the unrelenting parade of blackness during the 1990s, we finally got to add some color -- like a little white and red! This was part of the whole new wave revival in pop music, although I'm pretty sure no one dressed this way back in 1977 or 1983. But then "Stacy's Mom" and "So Damn Hot" were also too stylistically self-conscious to really sound like The Cars. C'mon though, at least it brought style back into rock music after the thrift store affectations of alternative rock and the exercise uniforms of the boy bands.


[House in winter, view of Montjuic from my apartment's terrace, Antonio Miro store]

I don't have any pictures of my home in Maryland at night. The first is from where I am now, and the other two are from when I lived and worked in Barcelona while Spain was enjoying a housing bubble and design craze of its own.


[Avinguda Diagonal where the upscale mall L'Illa is]

More views of Catalan oneupsmanship in the contest to be more culturally dynamic than other regions of Spain.


[Friends of mine in their early 20s from Girona, Spain and Tokyo, Japan]

Spain increasingly joined the rest of Western Europe and its offshoots, so that seeing young girls with a nose ring or guys sporting a "fashion mullet" and capri pants was entirely common. Japan finally emerged from its Lost Decade, allowing the trend-thirsty young people to pour into the shopping districts and get their fix again. I suspect most of the NYT pictures reflect a gloomy view because hardly any of them were teenagers or in their 20s at the time. Unlike the boring '90s, the 2000s were a youth decade -- maybe not as much as the '80s were, but still.


[Children feeding pigeons in Plaça Catalunya, in their costumes outside for Carnival, misbehaving right in front of adults, and smiling for no reason at all]

I'm surprised the NYT didn't include anything on helicopter parents, but then their readership is more childless than the average internet user. The top two are random pictures that I snapped. The girl in the lower right is a Catalan friend's little sister, and the boy in the lower left is her cousin (I have no idea who the daring 4 year-old is).

In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith advises us to keep company with those who are more likely to be indifferent spectators of our behavior -- a close friend might indulge our continual brooding when they should really help us snap out of it, or encourage our vanity in good times when they should really help to keep us grounded. In today's world where it's trivial to sort into groups of very similar people, we tend not to run into these indifferent spectators often or at all. But children, especially if they are not your own, couldn't care any less about the feelings of grown-ups. When you're in danger of letting a promotion or the way a new suit looks go to your head, they'll give you the "I don't get it" look and take you down a peg. And when you're brooding at unnecessary length, they may not tell you outright to get a grip and move on, but their relative lack of sympathy and indulgence are a signal to do so all the same.

The late Medieval worship of teenage beauty

While browsing through social history books, one title jumped out at me: Young Medieval Women. One chapter argues that the makers of late Medieval culture considered a female's perfect age to be "maidenhood":

For my purposes it is most significant that youthfulness was a key element of this ubiquitous ideal of feminine beauty. The ages of some Middle English literary heroines who are described as beautiful are stated, and they are always in their teens. Freine is twelve when men begin to notice her beauty, and Goldboru, 'the fairest wuman on live' is an heiress waiting to come of age. Chaucer's Virginia -- a 'mayde of excellent beauty' who is described in conventional terms -- is fourteen. Where the age of the beautiful woman is not stated, her youth is implicit in her figure, with its slender limbs, small high breasts, narrow waist and smooth white skin. An ugly woman, in contrast, is often old, with loose skin, a forest of wrinkles and breasts like deflated bladders.

The author is a post-teenage female, yet in her chapter there is none of the bitterness or scorn that we'd expect from Sailer's rule of female journalism. Aside from the age of girls in literature, she discusses the era's obsession with the Coronation of the Virgin. When Mary is crowned in Heaven, she argues, she should be shown in the idealized female form, just as Jesus is shown in the idealized male form (he usually looks like he's in his late 20s to mid 30s). The key detail is that usually Mary does not wear a wimple, which only married women wore (the average age at marriage for females was early to mid 20s). Rather, she's shown with long, luxurious flowing locks, as well as immaculate and fair skin and youthful facial geometry. She never looks 12, but mid-to-late teens, sure. (When Goldboru is described as "an heiress waiting to come of age," remember that girls went through puberty much later before the 20th C, probably around 17 instead of 13.)

Looking through the various paintings at the Wikipedia page and through Google Images, it's clear that this pattern isn't always there. Most of the Italian and Spanish paintings show her with a wimple and sometimes a matronly face, while the Northern European ones usually show her as youthful and with uncovered hair. At least in Chaucer's neck of the woods, the overall story seems to hold up. The only half-baked idea I have for the North-South difference is that in Northern Europe the family structure was more nuclear, while the Southern European structure was more extended. When your view of marriage is finding the right one and running off to start your own household, you'll idealize your high school sweetheart more than if your view of marriage includes a matriarch ruling over a mini-empire of a household.

While the ideal of beauty is not the same at every time and in every place, it's clearly bounded. In no society is the old maid chased after as she is among some of our primate relatives. The contemporary American ideal must be pushing the upper limit, what with post-menopausal women appearing on the cover of Playboy and the greater focus on housewives than sorority girls. These are the tails of the idealized age distribution, but still -- you wouldn't have seen that in most other places and times. Northwestern Europe during the Late Middle Ages is a case from the lower bound. And we're not talking about a greasy heavy metal band singing about jailbait -- the examples come from high literature and religious paintings.

No social disapprobation for finding teenagers attractive, plus a widespread low-carb diet? I was born in the wrong century. Yeah, there were all those disasters that upended the 14th C, but I would've made it through. And with a lot of the land cleared out, the survivors must have had a relatively comfortable standard of living, enabling them to think about higher concerns than "where's the food at?"

Decline of Christmas: Christmas cards

Poking around the Postal Service's Household Diary Study, I found some data on how many "holiday greeting cards" the average American household receives each year. Overwhelmingly these are Christmas cards, with Valentine's a distant second. Not all years are up on the web, but here's what is available:


Using Lexis-Nexis, I found an estimate of 26 Christmas cards for 1990, so that the number of all holiday greeting cards would have been a bit above -- probably around the 1987 level of 29 cards across all holidays. The first big drop is visible by 1994, when the number of cards received per household was about 25% lower than in 1987. There was another drop-off starting in 2003, and during the most recent years of 2007 and 2008, the number is down about 40% from the late '80s / early '90s. This does not merely reflect the fact that there are more households now than then, which would tend to lower the ratio even if the total number of cards stayed the same. In 1987, 2.856 billion holiday greeting cards were received vs. 2.117 billion in 2007 -- a decrease in sheer volume of 736 million cards.

There were several feature journalism articles this season about how few Christmas cards people have gotten this year, but most of them traced the decline to the recession, gift cards replacing more heartfelt tokens, and of course the internet and e-cards. However, we now see that those are all wrong, given how far back the decline goes. Remember, the web was just becoming common in 1994; sending e-cards -- which still are incredibly unpopular -- had to wait for it to reach greater maturity. (The earliest use of "e-card" in the NYT is from 1999.) Gift cards, too, only became widespread in the late '90s and 2000s.

This example reinforces two general points I've been making in these Decline of Christmas entries:

1) The various signals of Christmas have been steadily fading since roughly the mid-1990s, at least a decade before the "War on Christmas" debate erupted. Rather than special interests knocking off Christmas-lovers, the general public voluntarily dropped out. None of the changes in the signals is clearly related to the internet, macroeconomic indicators, etc. The only strong association I see is the larger cultural shift away from sincerity and sentimentality toward affectation and irony.

2) They have not been replaced with new signals. Rather, we're pulling out investment from the holiday altogether and shifting it into other holidays like New Year's Eve and Halloween (which Lexis-Nexis suggests was taken over by adults also in the mid-1990s). Anything that will afford us greater opportunities to make the duckface for the cameras.

This will probably be it for the series, although I might put up something brief on Christmas trees if there's easy data. Aside from that, leave suggestions in the comments and I'll follow them up if it won't take too long.

Decline of Christmas: caroling and new Christmas songs

Since our social capital is in decline, and since we hate going outdoors, it shouldn't surprise us to learn that hardly anyone goes Christmas caroling anymore:

In 2005, a National Christmas Tree Association survey found that only 6 percent of respondents planned to go caroling--down from 22 percent in 1996.

I searched Lexis-Nexis for more dates but couldn't find any. If this is like everything else, it's probably a bit lower than 6% this year, and would have been even higher than 22% in the '70s and '80s. The last time I remember carolers knocking on my family's door was sometime in the late '80s or early '90s in Upper Arlington, Ohio, a white upper-middle class suburb of Columbus. Whenever the change happened, it sure seems to have started before what the "War on Christmas" people talk about, namely more recent battles over whether Wal-Mart or whoever uses "Christmas" or "holiday" in its ads and signs. Here is yet another piece of evidence that the general public was already growing apathetic toward Christmas during the 1990s.

OK, maybe we don't drop in on our neighbors anymore, but how is Christmas music doing in general? Wikipedia has a list of nearly 400 Christmas songs, and here they are by release date:


But this doesn't account for the size of the recorded music industry, so here is that same number of Christmas songs but standardized using the number of RIAA gold and platinum singles (standard or digital). Unfortunately, the RIAA certification doesn't go back through the 1940s or before. The x-axis labels are the first year in a 5-year stretch:


It's pretty clear that the 1955 - 1964 period was a lot more productive. Still, the RIAA certification had only just begun, and the mass market music industry wasn't so mature either. So trying to give the benefit of the doubt to more recent times, here is the same graph as above, but only from 1965 and later:


No clear trend overall, although the jump in the first half of the 2000s looks suspicious given every other bit of data we have on the popularity of Christmas.

Instead of looking at a random list of 400 songs, let's look at those Christmas songs that are rated the highest. ASCAP published a list of the top 25 most played Christmas songs from 2001 - 2005, and here they are by release date:


Now that looks more plausible. Clearly most of the recent Christmas songs -- and by that I mean within the past 45 years -- have been published but not heard and retained. There's one song from 1984 ("Do They Know It's Christmas?") and another from 1970 ("Feliz Navidad"), but that's the extent of worthwhile innovation for nearly a half-century. I don't buy the argument that it takes time for new hits to catch on -- not 50 years. There are plenty of songs from the '80s through the present that remain popular -- but they are not Christmas songs.

Rather, I think it says more about the flagging interest in Christmas. We certainly can introduce new traditions -- after all, before 1950 many of our traditional songs didn't exist -- so why haven't we? On the demand side, consumers don't hold Christmas songs to high standards since they don't care very much about that holiday anymore. So on the supply side, artists will not compete based on quality of songs, but on quantity and price -- just churn out a bunch of shit on a Christmas theme and price it really low in order to move it.

These Christmas song data show that we're not merely shifting from one Christmas tradition to another -- say, if blue and orange became the recognized Christmas colors, replacing red and green, but where the presence of these new Christmas colors was still ubiquitous. Rather, we're junking those traditions and failing to replace them altogether. In the post below, we saw previous survey data showing that a smaller portion of American families are even exchanging gifts -- not merely that they are exchanging gifts as often as before, but just giving gift cards instead of real presents. Gift-giving on the whole is down.

I don't mind the secularization and commercialization of Christmas -- fighting either of those trends is a losing cause, and that probably doesn't matter anyway. Christmas did just fine from the '50s through the '80s, even though most new Christmas songs weren't religious and shopping for material gifts became more common. It's the apathetic, ironic mood that the culture sunk into starting in the mid-1990s that is the real danger to Christmas. The secular and commercial Christmas was still sentimental and worked people up into the holiday spirit, offering many suitable replacements for older traditions. The apathetic-ironic attitude toward Christmas doesn't only rail against commercialism. * It urges us to not give a shit no matter what the source of our Christmas cheer might be.

* A hollow charge, given how many formerly sacred domains those people have allowed to become commercialized, such as getting food and shelter.

Decline of Christmas: giving gifts

The NYT has an article on the same cultural shift I've been talking about: "Saying No, No No Instead of Ho-Ho-Ho". Most of it is anecdotal, but there's this bit of survey data:

This year’s survey, conducted by the polling firm Harris Interactive, found that while 95 percent of households plan to celebrate Christmas (about the same as every year), the percentage of families who plan to exchange gifts is dropping: 77 percent this year, down from 85 percent in 2005. Slightly fewer people said they were going to attend parties or listen to Christmas music, too.

Given that all the other decline-of-Christmas shifts go back at least to the mid-1990s, I'd be surprised if this one didn't as well.

Decline of Christmas: usage of "Christmas" vs. "holiday"

[Part one and part two]

Next up, let's see when the shift away from "Christmas" and toward "holiday(s)" began. I searched the NYT from November of a given year through January of the following year, just to make sure the context is Christmas rather than Easter or the Fourth of July. Here's the portion of all articles that use either word:


From at least 1950 to 1970, there's no change in how common either word is. During the 1970s, the NYT begins to focus a lot more on the Christmas theme, with both words seeing a big jump (although the one for "holiday" is a larger change). That settles down and both levels peter out during the 1980s. It's only around 1990 that "holiday" begins a steady surge in popularity, while "Christmas" doesn't trend so noticeably up or down. By 1999, the two are used equally frequently, with the occasional year where "holiday" actually beats "Christmas."

The two words are complements rather than substitutes -- their movement patterns basically mirror each other's, rather than a rise in one causing a fall in the other. It's just that over time the gap between them shrinks to the point where both are equally common:


Sometime during the mid-to-late 1970s the gap starts to steadily close. This is unlike the other cases where the shift began in the mid-1990s, and I have no good guess about why this case is so different. It's probably because we need to look at a case where the two words would be substitutes, forcing the user to pick one or the other. That's typically what the "War on Christmas" people mean when they talk about the phrase "Happy Holidays" replacing, not merely being said alongside of, "Merry Christmas."

Decline of Christmas: special TV episodes

Continuing our look at the public's waning interest in Christmas, let's turn to something more common than complaining about ugly sweaters. Our main form of entertainment for the last 50 or so years has been television (it still is), and Christmas-themed episodes have been shown since the beginning. Still, we'd expect the number of episodes in some year to reflect how much the public enjoys Christmas -- more when interest is high, and low otherwise, all other things being equal.

I couldn't believe it when I saw it -- although maybe I shouldn't have been so surprised -- but Wikipedia has a page that lists nearly 1,100 Christmas TV episodes for the U.S. alone, including what year they were broadcast in. Here is a graph showing how many episodes came out in a given year, using a 2-year moving average:


Remember that these raw numbers aren't corrected for anything, so in the early stages when TV sets weren't widespread and there were only a few shows that could put out a Christmas episode anyway, this graph is probably not an apples-to-apples comparison. There's a pretty steady increase starting in the mid-'70s and peaking in 1996. Some of that may partly reflect the growing number of people with TVs and the proliferation of shows being broadcast, but I doubt that's all of it, simply because there's a nearly 10-fold increase in the number of Christmas episodes during that time.

However, once the line starts dipping down, that cannot be due to how many people own TVs or how many shows there are -- those are still both growing, not shrinking. There is an upward blip in 2001, perhaps due to the shot-in-the-arm of sincerity that we got after 9/11, but after 1996 the trend has been steadily downward. For those guessing that the internet began siphoning viewers away, lowering the demand for Christmas TV episodes, note that the internet has not been much of a substitute for TV.

To try to correct for the changing world of TV show production and consumption, I looked for data on how many TV episodes were broadcast in each year. Together with the above data, we could answer the question, "What portion of all TV episodes in some year were dedicated to Christmas episodes?" I'm sure those data exist somewhere, but I couldn't find them easiliy. (Although if a particularly bored reader finds them, I'll use them to make the corresponding graph.)

But I did find data on how many households owned a TV. This isn't ideal because it's not like 5 Christmas specials being split up among 10 thousand or 10 million households makes any difference -- any episode can be shown to an unlimited number of viewers, unlike splitting up 5 plots of land among 10 thousand or 10 million households. Still, I use TV ownership as a proxy for how mature the TV industry is. The source only went back to 1970, and is only unbroken starting in 1985, but the overall picture is still pretty clear:


Again we see the surge starting in the mid-'70s, a peak this time in 1995, and a decline afterward, aside from the blip in 2001. So as with the "dissing on ugly sweaters" phenomenon, it looks like the mid-'90s were the turning point in the public's growing apathy about the Christmas season. And like that example, this shows that the "War on Christmas" is really more about a plummeting of consumer demand rather than a tiny special interest group imposing their plan on an unwilling public. Sadly, the public seems to care less and less about Christmas.

I haven't watched TV in nearly forever, so I have no hunch about this, but it would be worth comparing how sincere vs. ironic or above-it-all the Christmas episodes are from the period when they were increasing vs. decreasing in popularity.

I remember that as late as 1994, My So-Called Life ran a Christmas episode about teenage runaways -- but the mother and daughter mend their relationship. (Turns out it's on Hulu, "So-Called Angels"). In 1991 there was the Saved by the Bell two-parter that focused on a not-crazy-or-addicted homeless.man and his daughter -- but they get taken in and given help by Zack's familiy. And of course the first Simpsons episode to air was the 1989 Christmas special where Homer is down on his luck -- but the family becomes richer because they adopt the dog Santa's Little Helper. If there are any couch potatoes with better knowledge, feel free to fill us in on what the more recent Christmas episodes have been like.

Christmas: victim of a war or ironic atrophy of interest?

Most of what the "War on Christmas" people detail is how special interest groups have been chipping away at public signals of Christmastime over the years -- removing Christmas trees from public spaces, bullying people into saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas," and so on. But none of this could have succeeded if the group under attack really cherished Christmas; they'd tell the scrooges to go mind their own fucking business, and we wouldn't have seen any of these changes. The blandness of the Christmas season these days says more about how little the mainstream cares to stick up for it, and less about the power of whiny special interest groups.

Over the next several days I'll look at data on various aspects of what used to make Christmas fun and how they've changed.

It's always worth trying to see the big picture, and I think this is just part of the decline in sincerity and sentimentality and the rise of ironic screwballery that's infected the culture since the mid-1990s. I mean, we're like too sophisticated to get into the Christmas spirit. The same is true for other holidays that people used to get into, like Halloween. Now the point of Halloween is to show how cleverly meta and ironic or sarcastic you can be with your costume, instead of dressing up as one of a few stock characters in order to not draw so much attention to yourself. It's easier to let go and have fun when you're not critiquing everyone's costume like some book award panel.

In fact, we see the exact same thing for Christmas in the form of the "ugly sweater party," where you spend a month or so finding just the right ugly Christmas sweater, and join a bunch of other ironic morons to show how above Christmas cheer you are. While the ugly sweater party only began in 2006 (as shown by Lexis-Nexis and Google Trends searches for the phrase), the dissing on ugly sweaters actually started earlier.

I searched all US newspapers and wires using Lexis-Nexis, which gives results back through the 1980s. The phrase appears in the late '80s but only referring to what sports coaches wore. The first time it appears in the context of grousing about Christmas is -- would you guess it? -- 1994, and it appears reliably after then. It's not as though there were no ugly Christmas sweaters during the '80s and early '90s, nor that people didn't recognize that they were ugly. They just figured that they should get a life and move on without dwelling on the matter. But once the movement toward sarcasm began to take over the culture, suddenly everyone starts complaining about those damned ugly sweaters.

Here are a few examples from the mid-1990s, when the primal scream therapy began.

"Memories of presents bring smiles and a scowl" (Dec 1994)

The most unforgettable gift I ever received would have to be this tacky green and yellow sweater, and I had to wear it, too, because it was a present from family. I hated that ugly sweater, and I hated wearing it even more. It really isn't that unusual, but goodness it was ugly.

"Back to the mall; Returns, bargain-hunters keep store clerks hopping" (Dec 1995)

Not only were people eager to exchange gifts, that ugly sweater, those pants that don't fit, but they were savvy enough to know good bargains would be abundant.

" 'Tis the season for traditions" (Dec 1996)

Shredded wrapping paper, colored lights, the aroma of a turkey baking in the oven. The Charlie Brown Christmas special, leaving cookies and milk for Santa, ugly sweaters from your aunt and mom's Christmas morning cinnamon rolls. Going to grandma's house.

Traditions. They are the things you count on every year about this time.

"Thanks for the Memories; Childhood reminiscences can last a lifetime" (Sep 1997)

What do you remember about the holidays of your childhood? Is it great presents under the tree? The ugly sweaters Aunt Gladys knitted for you every year? The time Uncle Irv got drunk and danced with a lampshade on his head?

To reiterate, the phrase does not appear at all during the 1980s or the early 1990s, then all at once we see predictably regular complaints about ugly sweaters starting in 1994. It's this sort of mindset -- blowing a tiny nuisance all out of proportion -- that marks the turning away from Christmas. There are other signs that I'll look at later, but these are the real sources of the War on Christmas' success.

After all, it's not as though the ACLU haven't been trying to kill Christmas for much longer. They brought cases against public displays of religious holiday symbols in 1988. Back then, the culture would have told those fags to go do something productive with their time. Here's how the Supreme Court ruled on a similar case in 1985:

In 1985, the High Court deadlocked over a nativity scene case from Scarsdale, N.Y. The Scarsdale government had banned a private group from erecting a creche in a public park. A Federal appeals court struck down the ban as an unconstitutional infringement on ''religious speech,'' and the Supreme Court's inability to decide the case left that decision intact.

Given the constant force that the armies of rabid busybodies are always pressing against the gates of civilization, the only reason that they should succeed is that the guardians and the populace have given up on giving a shit anymore.

Non-buzz buzzwords of 2009

In one of Steven Pinker's books, he mentions how little predictive power the language mavens have when it comes to which neologisms will catch on. These verbal dorks are too dazzled by each other's cleverness to see what there is a real demand for among the broad base of language users. In that respect, they're an awful lot like open source geeks who are more concerned with impressing each other than designing something that the average consumer wants.

So it comes as no surprise that the NYT's list of the buzzwords of 2009 is made up almost entirely of losers. I only recognized about 1/3 of them, and I don't imagine any will stick other than "netbook" and "Great Recession."

For a true example of a 2009 buzzword, and one that will probably be around for the next few years, there is "fml" -- short for "fuck my life," used mostly on young people's text messages, facebook status updates, etc., after some kind of bad news:

omg theres gonna be a sick rager tonight but my GAY mother won't let me have the car. fml

For those without college students on their friends list, Google Trends shows its explosion in popularity this year, and unlike most of those invisible buzzwords in the NYT list, it appears in Urban Dictionary, where thousands of people have voted on how appropriate the various definitions are. It's not listed, however, at the wordnik.com website run by the writer of the NYT list.

And while it's retarded to try to weave every cultural thread into the Great Recession narrative, you could easily tell a just-so story about how "fml" signals the especially tough times that young people are going through, with teenage unemployment at an all-time high of over 25%.

It's pretty well known that young people are the primary innovators of language -- not always for the better, of course -- so why do the language mavens focus so much on the dopey slang of inside-the-Beltway Boomers? Most so-called intellectual types are incredibly disdainful of the entrepreneurial spirit -- which is, like, too base for someone with an art history degree from Bowdoin -- so that they remain completely ignorant of the cultural churning all around them. Perhaps these lists of non-buzzwords are a status signal -- look at how out-of-touch and above-it-all I am. I'm not sure when our cultural elite became such flabby, hermetic fags, but you certainly wouldn't have seen that in Pepys' London or even as recently as the New York Beats.

This town needs an enema!