Monday, March 2, 2015

Gibber



\swich-uh-ROO, SWICH-uh-roo\
noun
1. an unexpected or sudden change or reversal in attitude, character, position, action, etc.

Quotes
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 psychicswitcheroo and recognize the genius in a series that you’d severely underestimated.
-- Emily Nussbaum, "Hate-watching 'Smash,'" The New Yorker, April 27, 2012
Origin
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”

BY 



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 loathedgets 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-droppingMarilyn-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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