Switcheroo came to English in the 1930s. The suffix -eroo is used to create familiar, usually jocular variations of semantically more neutral nouns, like switch.
| \EM-bluhm\ |
noun
1. an object or its representation, symbolizing a quality, state, class of persons, etc.; symbol: The olive branch is an emblem of peace.
2. a sign, design, or figure that identifies or represents something: the emblem of a school. |
| Quotes |
But instead of joining the former Paris prison as an emblem of a decisive break with the past, Mr. Yanukovych’s palatial residence, tennis courts, golf course, personal zoo, helicopter pad and acres of landscaped gardens are now “a symbol of our state’s inability to function normally,” Mr. Syrotiuk said.
-- Andrew Higgins, "Ukraine Palace Is Still Emblem of Dysfunction," New York Times, September 8, 2014 |
| Origin |
Emblem entered English in the 1400s from the Latin emblēma meaning "inlaid or mosaic work," and ultimately derives from the Greek émblēma meaning "something put on."
| \ad HOK-uh-ree\ |
noun
1. reliance on temporary solutions rather than on consistent, long-term plans. |
| Quotes |
Any founder who told the literal truth about the frenzied ad-hockery of launching a company would scare away customers and investors and quickly be out of business.
-- Noam Scheiber, "How to Succeed in Silicon Valley Without Really Trying," New Republic, September 7, 2014 |
| Origin |
Ad hockery is the noun form of ad hoc, an adverb meaning "for the special purpose or end presently under consideration," translating literally from Latin as "for this." It entered English in the late 1800s.
| \byoo-tuh-REY-shuhs\ |
adjective
1. of the nature of, resembling, or containing butter. |
| Quotes |
And, certainly, fine food, lots of the best wine, had given his jowls a butyraceous sheen.
-- Ken Bruen, Purgatory, 2013 |
| Origin |
Butyraceous can be traced to the Latin word for butter, butyrum, with the -aceous suffix meaning "resembling, having the nature of." It entered English in the mid-1600s.
| \in-YOO-til\ |
adjective
1. of no use or service. |
| Quotes |
There was an elevated sluiceway, part wood, part concrete: porous, pocked, inutile, filled with silt and more debris.
-- John McPhee, "A Reporter at Large: Minihydro," The New Yorker, February 23, 1981 |
| Origin |
Inutile comes from the Latin term ūtilis meaning "useful" with the negative prefix in-. It entered English in the 1400s.
| \pik-WIK-ee-uhn\ |
adjective
1. (of words or ideas) meant or understood in a sense different from the apparent or usual one.
2. (of the use or interpretation of an expression) intentionally or unintentionally odd or unusual. |
| Quotes |
She also said, smiling subtly, that she used the word friends in a Pickwickian sense…I replied that I did not know what she meant; and she said to me…"My friends, there are no friends!"
-- Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution, 1954 |
| Origin |
Pickwickian is derived from the name of the protagonist in Charles Dickens's novel The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club, published serially from 1836–37. While Dickens was using the adjective Pickwickian in the 1930s, it took several more years before it caught on more widely.
Hate-Watching “Smash”
Being a television critic often means being wrong—only
really, really slowly.
Shiny screeners arrive, harbingers of the new season, and
you let folks know what looks promising. Then suddenly the Whitney-created show
you loathed gets
better, while the Whitney-created show you defended gets worse.
Or you go through some psychic switcheroo and recognize
the genius in a series that you’d severely
underestimated. Or let’s say there’s a TV show with a terrible name like
“Cougar Town,” and it gradually evolves into an enjoyable sitcom that should
more logically be called “Drunk Friends,” and you feel a little sad about your two-thousand-word
essay pegged to the first six episodes.
All of this is preamble to my acknowledgement that, while I
stand by many of my opinions (“Luck,” dull; “The Good Wife,” excellent), there
are times a critic makes a bad bet. Let’s quote from my
gushy review of “Smash,” shall we?
TV critics recognize when they’re suckers for a pilot, and
for me, that was “Smash.”; Show within a show: check. Anjelica Huston: check.
Martinis splashed in faces, dancers giving side-eye, heels clicking in midtown:
check, check, check. I caught the NBC pilot last fall… but even then I knew
that as a fan of musicals on TV—co-dependently caught up on “Glee,” Dr.Horrible’s Singalong Blog on
my iPhone, and secretly delighted by reality’s embrace of ballroom dancing—I
was an easy lay.
Truer words have never been spoken. Since I wrote that
passionate defense of the NBC series, I’ve tumbled out of bed, grabbed my
purse, and taken a long walk of shame. Because—to switch metaphors mid-stream,
the way “Smash” does with plots—since its delightful pilot, the show has taken
a nosedive so deep I’m surprised my ears haven’t popped. All the caveats I
noted but dismissed in my earlier review have become the definingly awful
features of “Smash.” These include but are not limited to every domestic event
involving Debra Messing’s character, Julia, from her attempts to adopt a
Chinese baby to her decision to cuckold a dull man with a creepy one, to her alarming array of earth-toned scarves. And despite the fact
that she’s on a tight deadline to complete her Marilyn Monroe musical, Julia
always finds a way to bicker with the show’s worst character, her whiny
teen-age son, Leo, who smokes pot, does not want pancakes, and repeatedly fails
to run away for good.
But really, there’s so much competition for the worst part
of “Smash.” You’ve got Ellis, that shonda to the Millennials.
You’ve got Dev and his headache of a political career. There’s the heat-free
love triangle in which Tom (Christian Borle, who gives a solid performance
against all odds) dates first a gay Republican lawyer and then a celibate
baseball-loving dancer. There’s Angelica Huston’s deus-ex-bartender boyfriend
and her hippie daughter, who showed up to deliver a memorably demented
monologue ending with “…and that’s why I ran away to Micronesia!” That speech
came just after the jaw-dropping Marilyn-as-Britney
number, which would qualify as the show’s musical low point, if it weren’t
for the Times Square sing-along, the Long Island Bar Mitzvah, and the poorly
edited bowling-alley dance routine, which managed to rip off (of all things)
“Grease 2.”
The show’s most intractable problem, however, is the former
“American Idol” winner Katherine McPhee, who plays Karen, that shiny-haired
Iowan ingénue and human humblebrag.
Even when I squint, and grade on a curve, it’s impossible to ignore how bad
McPhee’s performance is: the woman was given a one-note character, then took it
down a half-note. McPhee has a pretty pop voice, but she plays every scene with
a Splenda-flavored neutrality, which might not rankle so much if the show
didn’t keep insisting that Karen is a star whom everyone adores. During the
last episode, I spent most of my time mentally replacing the awed facial
expressions of cast members gazing at Karen as she sings with the horrified
expressions of “Game of Thrones” characters staring at King Joffrey as he
tortures minions. It helped.
There is one excellent actor in “Smash”: poor, trapped Megan
Hilty, who plays the Broadway trouper Ivy, Karen’s competition. Like every
other character on the show, Ivy has been saddled with terrible plots: in one
arc, Prednisone made her hallucinate and go all “Valley of the Dolls”; in
another, we suddenly discovered that Ivy’s mother is a famous actress played by
Bernadette Peters, which made no sense, given that she’s supposed to be a
plucky but unknown veteran who rises to starhood, not the heir to the Great
White Way. (What could be more marketable for a new musical than “daughter of a
famous Broadway actress”?)
Despite these obstacles,
Hilty has built a character who feels like a real Broadway diva: sexy, funny,
ambitious, insecure, at once selfish and giving. She has also delivered a few
truly thrilling musical performances, a fact made possible by perhaps the most
horrible thing about “Smash”: how good the songs from the musical within the
musical are. The songs written for “Bombshell,” the musical about Marilyn
Monroe, are generally zippy, magnetic numbers created by Marc Shaiman and Scott
Whitman. As a true geek of the musical genre, I’d be delighted to see this show
in real life, with its steam-room numbers about Darryl Zanuck and silly puns on
20th Century Fox. I’ve sung “Let Me Be Your Star” (quietly!) while strutting
through Times Square. If only I didn’t have to watch “Smash” to get scraps of
“Bombshell.”
I realize my vehemence is slightly suspect. I mean, why
would I go out of my way to watch a show that makes me so mad? On some level,
I’m obviously enjoying it. Maybe I secretly love “Smash,” at least in that
slap-in-the-face “Moonlighting” way. I do find the show so critically
destabilizing that I can’t decide whether I disliked that Bollywood
hallucination or thought it was a glorious masterpiece of camp. (I was certainly amused by
Megan Hilty being fed grapes.) I’ll even admit that the writers have made a few
admirably surprising swerves, such as having Derek, the show’s macho director,
be the character who goes full Black Swan, rather than his two cat-fighting
Marilyns, who have now become friends.
On Twitter, where I huddle with fellow “Smash” addicts,
someone compared our drug of choice to Aaron Sorkin’s failed series, “Studio 60
on the Sunset Strip.” The Micronesia speech, they pointed out, was the
equivalent of Studio 60’s infamously self-righteous “Afghanistan!” rant. The
Bollywood number felt parallel to that over-the-top Gilbert and
Sullivan routine. Like “Smash,” “Studio 60” was a show that people loved to
hate-watch, because it was bad in a truly spectacular way—you could learn
something from it, about self-righteous TV speechifying and failed satire and
the dangers of letting a brilliant showrunner like Sorkin run loose to settle
all his grudges in fictional form. I’m not certain whether this applies to
“Smash,” from which I’ve learned mostly how not to wear a scarf. But I could be
wrong. |
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