Thursday, June 10, 2010

Authentic and dynamic

The full blurb is "Authentic and dynamic ... this band clearly has something to say". [Ellipsis in original.] That is going from memory as I noticed it standing in line at Starbucks this morning. It was on the jacket of a CD they were flogging by the cash.

Anyway, is there anything in that blurb that is actually good?
Authentic crap is still crap.

Tornadoes, earthquakes, riots and rapes are all dynamic.

People who set a cross up on someone's lawn and light it on fire clearly have something to say.
In all those cases authentic, dynamic and "having something to say" clearly mean something undesirable. And yet all of these expressions have come to mean something positive all by themselves in a certain kind of intellectually lazy use. This is possible because all of these expressions carry unspoken assumptions for a given audience. The blurb originally comes from The New York Times and the journalists take it for granted that they share certain beliefs about what authentic in "a good way" means.

Likewise for dynamic and having something to say. And likewise for diversity. "Diversity" in practice means "more room for the kind of opinions I would like to see included". As a consequence, diversity actually means the opposite of what it used to mean.

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