Wednesday, May 7

Prince Roy suggests 'tacky' for su2qi. That's not bad. Bartleby defines it as:
2a. Lacking style or good taste; tawdry: tacky clothes. b. Distasteful or offensive; tasteless: a tacky remark.
It's an older expression than I would have thought; the OED has this citation from 1883:
Two little cards (with his name printed on them in gilt. Tackey? Ugh).
(That's from Isabella Maud Rittenhouse's Maud, a journal about Cairo, IL.) I was thinking 'bourgeois', which the OED defines in this sense as "selfishly materialistic or conventionally respectable and unimaginative". Or, if a Philistine is a
person deficient in liberal culture and enlightenment, whose interests are chiefly bounded by material and commonplace things.

But often applied contemptuously by connoisseurs of any particular art or department of learning to one who has no knowledge or appreciation of it; sometimes a mere term of dislike for those whom the speaker considers 'bourgeois'.
then the adjective can mean "uncultured; commonplace; prosaic." That sums up most Americans and even more Chinese.

But I don't like to use either of those words because they sound so snobbish, and there are things in mass culture that I find appealing. Like Girardot in his Victorian translation of China : James Legge's Oriental pilgrimage: in a footnote describing Legge's trip throught the US, he complains that Legge's
accounts of Japan and the United States are also mostly in the genre of tourist literature--e.g., his meandering overland route included stops at Yosemite, the Mormon Temple, and, most egregiously, Niagara Falls!
Ah, yes--visiting Niagara Falls: how egregious! Poor Jimmy Legge. I know how he must feel. And since he lived 1815-1897, he might well have known what 'tacky' meant. I've been told my taste for 19th-century Romantic music is bourgeois, and it stung. I guess it's only OK to like that stuff if you do it as a post-modernist, ironically. (Be detached, not involved).

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