Musings on the byways of popular culture
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I’m not generally a fan of the ‘Purp, but earlier stuff like this I can tolerate more, and i must say they do look fine. Bouffant hair, orange satin Knickerbocker trousers, and Hugh Hefner in the middle of it when he wasn’t QUITE such a creep.
Style guides for then forthcoming party season welcomed.
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Aretha’s recent death got us all listening to her records again. The great Respect features “sock it to me”, presumably including an exclamation mark, but I’m not sure as this was a specifically U.S. phrase and I don’t presume to know all its nuances. Whatever coolness it once had was, I’m guessing, torpedoed by the disgraced Nixon picking it up and using it. Long gone now anyway, the phrase and everyone involved.
Now there are a lot of phrases we take for granted, they’re fashionable, but do they add anything? Just read a long and thoughtful reader’s letter to a football website and everything was fine until the chap added, as his parting shot, “just sayin”. What does this even mean? That he’s taking less or no responsibility for what he’s just written? That we shouldn’t blame him for whatever thoughts might ensue as a result of his words? That he wants to be loved? Maybe someone of the Massive can fill us in here.
So, former phrases, present phrases – I’ll add one more category: phrases that need to go now! Stop it, will you? I’m thinking here of “spitting the dummy”, so ubiquitous that the player was » Continue Reading.
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Raymond on The science of male grooming is far from being ‘settled’.
During a recent visit to a Turkish barber, I made a startling discovery which I hope may lead to me being recognised as having made a significant contribution to the science of grooming. Like most folk, I believed that the science had been more or less settled since the mid-seventies, when Jorge Silva’s ground-breaking ‘The hermeneutics of grooming’ was published. Silva’s research established that there were six recognisable stages on the ‘male haircut’ continuum:
Passive → Larval → Peacock → Business → Utilitarian → Topiary
The ‘passive’ phase encompasses the childhood years, when the male has no awareness of his hair and all responsibilities for grooming fall upon his mother. The second (or ‘larval’) phase begins when the young male becomes self-conscious and is, as Silva puts it, ‘quite fussy’ about his appearance. Stage three (the peacock phase) has been the subject of most academic attention. Gilligan and Porter’s influential paper on ‘The Hair Delusion’ (Oxford Tonsorial Review, 1991) observed that, during the peacock phase, a young man “may spend as much as one third of his income on hair products and spend as much as one » Continue Reading.
