Word of the Day

I've developed a habit of watching a daily youtube vlog in which the proprietor solves the day's New York Times crossword puzzle.  Puzzles debut, courtesy of the app that provides them on my phone, the eve of the day they are dated, so I have done them by the time I watch the vlog.  For me it's painless therapy in a way to watch someone else struggle with a theme or with the idiosyncrasies of a puzzle constructor's clues when my struggle is behind me.  Sometimes it's akin to group therapy for post traumatic stress disorder. The host of the vlog is a slightly faster solver than I am, especially considering he is talking his way through each clue and publicly exposing his strengths and weaknesses to a variously indifferent group of strangers.  He's a much younger fellow, an expatriate who lives in London and I've observed that he has expertise in areas that I lack and vice versa.  Popular culture references that I require every cross for fly off his fingers.  On the other hand, he was flummoxed recently by how a "Latin American spread" could be a "HACIENDA."   He had heard of a hacienda, but "spread" to his way of thinking had nothing at all to do with it; and I admit when he passed up "_ACIENDA" for the 5th time refusing to throw down an H  in the blank until he was sure it could be nothing else,  I was yelling at my screen.  It wasn't until the next day, when he shared a youtube comment someone had posted on the prior day's video explaining the sense that the constructor intended for "spread"-- a sprawling farm or estate-- that he half-heartedly accepted the legitimacy of the clue, although he insisted the usage was in his experience expiring.  This was news to me.

Cogitating a bit on the difference in our perceptions of this sense of "spread", I developed a theory about why the word might have struck a millennial as out-of-date.  Could it have anything to do with the way that student debt has meant that many of his generation are not purchasing homes until much later if at all?  For my generation, by the time we were his age (I assume he's in his early to mid 30's), many more of us were homeowners*.  Many of us had probably ironically referred to our dwellings as "spreads" taking a post modern cue from our parents for whom the concept was familiar from the formerly more ubiquitous genre of the Western, and from whom we'd already overheard the joke when we were youngsters.  Had his generation not been paying attention at their parents' boring get togethers with other parents or, had they, simply by having no opportunity to wield it, let the usage atrophy?

Hours later, I myself encountered a word I'd never heard in a passage from Naomi Klein's 2007 paradigm changer, The Shock Doctrine:

Ajay Kapur, the former head of Citigroup Smith Barney’s global equity strategy group in New York, encourages his clients to invest in his "Plutonomy basket" of stocks, featuring companies like Bulgari, Porsche, Four Seasons and Sotheby’s. "If plutonomy continues, which we think it will, if income inequality is allowed to persist and widen, the plutonomy basket should continue to do very well."

Kapur and colleagues revived an obscure word coined in the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century, 'plutonomy', for use in a number of bullish reports for upmarket investors circa 2005, highlighting the novelty of the weird effects of unfettered growth in wealth at the very top in contrast to the very bound and constricting prevailing conventions of economy so familiar to the rest of us down here in the trickle down gutter.  One massive financial meltdown later-- that as usual came out of the hides of everyone but the culprits whose amoral greed made it happen-- and the word fell out of favor.  Those papers have been disappeared from the web, but not before they could be recapped by John Sidor at Leadership Thoughts Blog.  The Shock Doctrine for those who may be unfamiliar tells the story of how this lopsided distribution of the planet's wealth wound up in one very small corner of the population-- it was essentially through years of violent application of a particularly religious ideology, the fundamentalist sect of neoliberalism whose pope was Milton Friedman.  Folks of my generation may remember the kindly old elf of capitalism from his Nobel Prize in Economics (the annual vanity prize that economists award to themselves to try to persist the notion that they are actually contributing something valuable to human knowledge) which seemed to entitle him to a best selling book and PBS series, Free to Choose,  in which he pimped the free market to an America as yet reverberating ever more faintly with the more equitable Keynesian effects of FDR's New Deal.  They may not recall how he cut his teeth advising Chile's General Augusto Pinochet on how to combine the brutality of a regime wrested in a violent coup (with the participation of the CIA at the formerly secret urging of Henry "Dr. Kissinger" Kissinger on behalf of Richard Nixon) from the popular and popularly elected socialist Salvador Allende in 1973 with a particularly brutal austerity that ravaged what had been a democratizing Chile for nearly 2 decades.  For Chileans who had wanted Allende and not a Generalissimo, it was hell; for Friedman it was an experiment, and to his mind, a successful one.

Closer to home, Friedman fucked with the rest of us thanks to the aggressive ascension of true believers and useful idiots of both parties, from Reagan, through Clinton, the Bushes and beyond.   With the collapse of the Soviet Union, the painful implementation of neoliberal capitalism  across the globe including in the last remaining communist superpower China, and the defeat of organized labor in the US,  free market capitalism was declared the victor, and history was declared to be over. After 50 solid years of living under this theocracy, I've decided that caring that people get what they need even if they are poor† is for chumps.  Also that I'm a chump. 

Wish I knew who to credit.  Wish I'd thought of it.

~~~~~

* Mentally put scare quotes around the "owner" portion of that word.

† As an undergraduate in a large university at the dawn of the Reagan era, I knew an older fellow, a regular presence in the circle that revolved around a roommate who was vastly more social than me.  Andrew was a bachelor and perpetual auditor of classes who made his living playing piano for the recitals and auditions of instrumentalists in the music school.  While most of us were destined for other places (even though some of us like myself didn't know what we were doing and would never figure it out) he had been there for years and you could be certain would be there years longer, surely drifting in and out of whatever circle of cool people he found himself invited into.  I'll never forget and have long wanted to work into a post a comment he uttered in frustration one day discussing his latest tribulations with some creditor or bureaucracy interrupting his pursuit of a well lived life to grub for money or to place a financial obstacle in front of a modest ambition.  "They won't let you be poor," he said.  He was right.  They won't let you be poor.  To be happily poor in this wretched age is the most beautiful and insane and doomed ambition.