"Use other words please."

Where did I use 'scribes'? I dread to think.

Glitch is better than squirm at least. I'm too fond of 'glacial' by half.

Not that I'm about to read them all to find out, but you get the idea...

Revolutionary: I believe I was always already aware that this was a technical word, deployed by advertising agencies, to let you know that yr favourite supermarket product now came in packaging no longer cuboid, but TETRAHEDRAL! Yay.

Stunning: No it isn't. It's mildly amusing/surprising/diverting.

Ethereal: As noted over on Indie-a-Genre, this is now a corporate genre-name, acc. Tower records (i.e. like Reggae).

i was thinking of this before the thread was posted, but now i've gone and forgotten all of them and, even worse, i've probably even used those examples in recent writing.

pretentious: salvageable, actually, provided we can make the old big world use it as unalloyed praise

But yeah, sorry.

Sorry? since when did converting to glum stalinism just as your first work becomes a cause celebre (Aragon) or just attacking everyone who ever helped or admired you in print, and refusing lucrative commissions from all the major french newspapers (Breton) constitute a hack dimension? perhaps you're getting mixed up with Salvador Dali?

But •assiduous• curators of their own gallery-of-the-future post-revolution reps: which I just seriously wanna get up between sometimes, and bugger about with. I tht of including Dali, but it wd have taken the heat off the others.

x0x0

I'm not sure what annoys me more: that it has become an ugly shorthand for 'anally retentive', or that it's only used in such a limited 'slag off' way, compared with the original Freudian sense. I'm not an expert on Freud, but I seem to recall an anally retentive character being about much more than alphabetising your CD collection and making lists.

"myth" as in "the rock myth" - was about to use it in the Depeche/League thread and suddenly thought HOLD ON.

too easy and vague by half

(Kid vs scientist: who'd want to be anything else anyway?)

Dinosaurs rooled! For 70 million years!! Badly designed? To get rid of them, the cosmos had to hurl a rock the size of Birmingham — at Mexico!!!

Also (somewhat related, tho not somewhat rock-related): "FAT CATS"

I'm sorry, excuse me, just HOW is this headline shortcut going to help stir up class rage against capitalism?

Cats are great, fat cats are bigger, thus better QED.

Might as well call 'em Honey Bunnies or Wonky Donkeys...

"Chameleon" (Tanya made this point once but she nicked it off me or Pete) - David Bowie a rock chameleon i.e. ever-changing, unpredictable BUT chameleons blend into the background, so it's more like Soup Dragons-y bandwagon jumping AND the only colours they can do are various shades of dull green yellow and brown so 'unpredictable' is a bit off too.

(And this word is doubly evil if used in the same sentence as "punk rock")

Like, yeah, I can even *say* it with a nice French Canadian accent. Where did that stupid expression come from ?

Post Schmaltz should be used more often.

Yes — that’s the primary source of my revulsion. It’s not a mystery! Aggressive male sexuality intruding into my otherwise placid day is jarring.

Yeah it’s hilarious to me that the term for this is “semantic bleaching”. I suppose the entire concept of bleaching is going through the reverse process for me whereby it calls to mind much more unsettling mental images than it would have ten years ago.

I kind of do and don’t agree with you, LL? I was thinking about how full circle internet has come on certain things, like if you search “rape” or “raped” on ilx, some of the more relevant examples near the top are stuff like

Posted: 26 January 2007 at 21:31:19
this song raped me once

And that was so common on so much of the internet back then! Whereas now the tiktok influenced censorship of today, people will not type out the word rape even when it’s about literal, actual rape. I watched a video a couple of weeks ago about some manosphere prick, I forget which one, and they described some event as “he 🍇ed her and it was a known secret for a long time.” Like, grape emoji popping up in otherwise serious discussions of a difficult subject makes me feel like I’m going insane. It almost feels mocking, though the motivation is the video creator not wanting to get demonetised by the algorithms. So that leaves me uneasy, too. I don’t want capitalism and censorship to be the reason casual references died, I’d want it to be people actually being more educated and aware. Sadly…

Wrt “circle jerks”, which I do not use, I never thought of this as aggressive so much as pathetic. The term aiui is meant to be castigating overly self-referential pretentiousness, no? The imagery I have always got is a load of middle aged bearded men huffing and puffing over, oh, some topic that doesn’t interest me, and that’s always struck me as pathetic and even comedic but not so aggressive.

I vaguely remember some conservatives or media critics in the early '90s considering _The Simpsons_ vulgar and crude because of Bart using "sucks", "blows" and other now mild-sounding language.

Show itself (naturally) has a great bit on this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cfgqkMoeXBo

It's a very personal thing for me -- I don't choose to have this reaction, it's wired into me via decades of intrusive thoughts. In earlier times, I would have never even brought it up because of fears it would yield retaliation, a relentless assault of imagery that would leave me feeling even worse.

Re: circle jerk, yes agreed it is pathetic but the image of men/boys "huffing and puffing" disgusts me and therefore the result is the same. An intrusion of unwanted imagery into a situation that was previously neutral.

Again, I freely admit that this is something I have to deal with in my own mind and not anyone else's problem; I'm glad that bringing it up hasn't yielded a torrent of revolting images like it would have some years ago.

Yeah I hear that and especially on intrusive thoughts though haven’t experienced it with this.

I'm fascinated by the thought of Tracer sitting in all his work meetings crafting double entendres.

Whoa I just remembered that I *did* try to say something about this once and was rewarded with a “fuck off” iirc. It was in a thread for the band Liturgy. On zing outdoors so I’m not looking it up rn.
No wonder this felt dangerous to me lol/sob yet again.

i found it Liturgy

i claimed "it's 2015, can we not?" and got swiftly told off
i am not sharing this to relitigate that situation, but to note that this is not a new thing for me. i should have remembered this.

that was an out-of-line response on their part imo.

^^^

"I don't know who needs to hear this but..."

Louder for the people in the back

"the higher-ups"

“learnings”

😬

"...on my bingo card"

"ask" as a noun

"core memory"

istg if the pop-psychology of my lifetime manifested into a physical thing, it truly would be huge pile of literal bull shit, with a bunch of very ignorantly blissed out cows standing by at the ready.

needle drop

"final boss"

stop, please

See also final form, one-shot, side quest, level up, etc

Young people (tm) seem to use video game slang all the time. NPC, bot, etc.

they've gamified my anxiety disorder

A student wrote that he had leveled up his writing skills in my class and I found it helpful tbh — to see it how they see it helps me encourage other students to try in the pursuit of leveling up.

leveled-up is useful. i don't mind these words if they're useful

'level up' makes zero sense to me as a phrase. to my brain it just means 'fix something that's wonky' and i have to make a conscious effort to interpret it any other way

NPC is dehumanising language and has a strong fashy flavour, really hate to see non-fashy people using it.

It’s a very 2026 phenomenon that the type of cunts who 10 years ago were calling libcucks NPCs now spend all their time talking to a literal NPC that they think is god/their gf/therapist/financial advisor

NPC is horrible, yes. Reflective of a solipsistic mindset, but also a reaction formation against the idea that one might not actually be as important as one wishes to be.

i get that npc comes from toxic message board culture and furthermore from video games which have nothing of value to offer to anyone, but 'people who just follow along' is a real phenomenon that deserves some kind of shorthand that isn't too derisive i guess. 'default people', 'mainstreamers', something like that. 'sheeple' if you will.

I will have to ask my daughter about the decision between NPC and bot.

That went terribly, now I'm even more confused.

coronate/coronated evidently continues to give me sub-editor's histamine prickle lol: you can just say crown/crowned and lose literally nothing meaningwise (and gain style-wise imo)

for the fussy of mind "coronation" in the sense of the official ceremony of the crowning of a king (or by extension i guess the official ceremony of the inauguration of a president ect ect) is fine, bcz a latinate term for some all-channels fancy performative* event completely with parchment scrolls and big stamped seals is perhaps helpfully distinctive

"coronation vs contest" is iffy by these pernickety standards but does have a certain rhetorical-alliterative energy so i'll allow it (not that "crowning vs content" doesnt)

*note correct usage austin fans!!

new bad trend: artist bios/info profiles that have a single sentence of no more than like 6 one syllable words. or worse, just a single "🥴" emoji or some other anti-information.

USE _ANY_ WORDS PLEASE READING IS (FUN)DAMENTAL

yeah, whenever I see emoji-heavy bios on like, instagram or whatever, they display so small that I strain my eyes trying to make out what each one is. I swear my complaint isn't just because I'm pushing 50. I can navigate emojis just fine in a text message chain.

Any form of "douche" used negatively makes me cringe. Not only is it an extremely unpleasant visual, but it is also most often associated with feminine hygiene, therefore it feels pretty rooted in misogyny.

The douche itself is rooted in misogyny — they’re unnecessary as the apparatus cleans itself.

"absolute cinema"

“‘absolute’ + xxxxx” is a terrible trend that’s as dated as “‘extreme’ + xxxxx.”

IIRC, “Absolute Watchmen” was the first time I saw it mass deployed as a brand name* and it felt like the New Jersey moment of a IP decline/death spiral in progress

*ignoring the vodka brand for now

stop calling new bands krautrock or krautrock inspired or w/e.. nobody sounds like faust, nobody's ever sounded like can except maybe the happy mondays,

it's always just motorik neu! stuff but nobody ever cops the non-motorik neu! stuff

if it has amon duul blood it gets called psych rock or space rock, anyway

end rant

this is true. it kinda feels like krautrock was a rite of passage for "serious" rock fans across a few decades, and so the word means more than just a sonic resemblance, it's like a listeners' club code word or something. which is kind of annoying. and yeah i don't hear much that actually sounds like the krautrock bands apart from the rhythm sections of neu! and can.

"egregious" used to mean "bad" gets my hackles up

*when used to mean "Bad"

Haha I remember reading this thread as a young man with ambitions towards music criticism and being like "fuck I can't use ANY words??".

In the spirit of this revival though I get really grouchy about the use of City Pop for countries other than Japan. With some I am admittedly not cultured enough to know whether there was an actual influence - I've seen mixes of Indonesian City Pop and Korean City Pop and sure Tatsuro Yamashita may have inspired some of those artists - but once you get to Lebanese City Pop and Brazilian City Pop, surely what's actually the case is just these artists were listening to the same black American artists the City Pop ppl were listening to?

I assume it's part of the tendency to see the past as if it was just like the present. Obviously you and I, and all the other people on Ilxor, were aware of city pop from the mid-1970s onwards - I remember being bored of listening to tape cassettes of city pop circa 1980, when I was only four years old* - but the vast, vast, huge, enormous, overwhelmingly huge and enormous, vast, all-encompassing etc probably didn't become aware of its existence until 2019.

Which raises the question of how music made in the 1980s on the other side of the world, by people who probably hadn't heart of city pop, could have been influenced by it. To be fair, most of the Reddit posts that Google throws up talk about "city pop-like music", but that's just a minor detail.

* I remember that my Japanese-British mother, who didn't exist, used to buy me tapes from a shop in Tokyo, Japan, where I didn't live.

IIRC, “Absolute Watchmen” was the first time I saw it mass deployed as a brand name*

Dunbier invented the format for Absolute Authority, a one-off where the sobriquet had an interaction with the title to gestalt a unique descriptor. Other editors did not bother to read the entire two-word phrase.

I mean, there are people out there - respectable music people, not just snobby gatekeepers - who claim that unless the music came from a particular time and place and scene, you can't call it "UK garage" and anything outside of that scene is something else (the term "UKG" was used, but surely that's just short for UK Garage?). Not sure I agree. Scenes are important, but I don't see why a Swedish band playing music directly influenced by 1950s guitar music can't call themselves "rock and roll"