Word: connoisseurship
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...other samurai artifacts: body armor, which turned its wearer into a bizarrely plated red lobster, and, of course, the weapons, the long sword known as a katana and the shorter wakizashi, together with their elaborate hilts, scabbards and other fittings, to which a large body of lore and connoisseurship attached. The figure who most vividly expressed the relation between culture and the samurai ethos remained a legend long after his death. He was Miyamoto Musashi (1584-1645), who wrote a famous text on swordplay (A Book of Five Rings) and reputedly killed 60 swordsmen before his 30th birthday; he then...
After generations of how-to books, the Dummies and Idiot's books seem to have caught on, thanks in part to the decade's obsession with faux connoisseurship--the need to know enough about Tuscan cooking or single-malt Scotch to not be an embarrassment at parties. But the blunt titles, with a wink at the reader, are a comforting reassurance that no one who picks up these books need apologize for having to start from scratch. "Would we have been able to laugh at ourselves enough to pick a book with the word idiot in the title...
...could see the lingering lure of Astaire art in the reaction to Frank Sinatra's death. That wasn't just Rat Pack nostalgia. It was an effusion of fondness and respect for a fine song finely sung, for vocal connoisseurship, for the ability--the first or the thousandth time he sings a song--to mine the meaning of a lyric...
Spurred, perhaps, by just that sort of publicity, would-be patients have been besieging urologists' offices and sex clinics--men both genuinely dysfunctional and merely dissatisfied, skulking around in hopes of achieving "better" erections through chemistry. Already, a kind of Viagra connoisseurship is beginning to take hold. "The hundreds are absolutely incredible," says a very satisfied user, referring to the drug's 100-mg maximum-strength dosage, "and the effect lasts through the following morning." What else can one say but Vrooom! Cheap gas, strong economy, erection pills--what a country! What a time to be alive...
...Nothing human is foreign to me," a dictum that floats in like elegant driftwood from the second century B.C., when the Roman playwright Terence said it. The line describes the ideal state of today's movie and television audience: a morally promiscuous and passive receptivity, a tolerant consumer's connoisseurship of vice and weirdness...