Casual
Epstein, Joseph
Casual YOU GOT ATTITUDE? I don't believe I have attitude, but I do own at least one bow tie that does. Some readers will wonder if that sentence isn't missing an indefinite article. Shouldn't it...
...How should I know...
...Like your tie," a woman said to me in New York...
...A certain malleability was also implicit in the old meaning of the word, the assumption being that one could alter, change, perhaps completely reverse one's attitude...
...and who needs this...
...For anyone who feels the want of that indefinite article, I can only say, in the mortal words of Mr...
...That's not attitude— that's merely conformity to something deeply repulsive...
...The word attitude has undergone a big change...
...When I wear it, strangers have been known to smile as I pass...
...It's taking joy in outrageousness...
...That is the problem: Semantically, the word is all over the place, popping up everywhere and meaning everything...
...The word's core meaning used to be "a mental position in regard to a fact or state," with that position often charged with feeling or emotion...
...No longer...
...Wild tie, man," a kid remarked in Chicago...
...The most important thing today," says the designer Stefano Gabbana, "is attitude...
...I suspect all three do...
...JOSEPH EPSTEIN...
...It was given to me by a friend, and I wear it with pride, regretting only that, it being a bow tie, I cannot look down upon it myself to derive the small pleasure it seems to give others...
...No two people seem to agree on its meaning, or at any rate on its new meaning...
...I got that broad in her nightgown on my radiator and them two R's, which don't mean rock 'n' roll...
...One can of course bemoan the slop-piness of standards that allows a long-established word suddenly to take on a new meaning...
...Shouldn't it be "an attitude...
...What can all this mean...
...At a Texas Rangers-Chicago White Sox game in early August, a fan held up a sign reading, "Attitude Is Everything...
...In Harp^^'s Bazaar, the blurb for a piece called "Party Favor" reads: "What does it take to pose as the latest girl...
...That objects—cars, clothes, shoes, wristwatches—can have attitude is a help in locating the word in its new meaning...
...That's great," another woman said, pointing at my tie in Bozeman, Montana...
...The novelist John O'Hara promised himself he would buy a Rolls-Royce if he won the Nobel Prize...
...why now...
...By its nature, language, as in the Paul Simon song, has this tendency to go slip-sliding away...
...Attitude is my Jelly-Belly red and white, unevenly polka-dotted, giant butterfly bow tie...
...Niche-conformity, another new phrase, implies that all groups, no matter how ostensibly far out, have their own strict rules...
...It's the bold, the outre, violating convention and propriety, but doing so by design, unashamedly...
...And: I don't like his attitude...
...It's in-your-face arrogance, deliberately unchecked, but arrogance in a (somehow) winning form...
...When it became clear he wasn't going to win it, he bought the car anyway, a four-door Silver Cloud III, dark green, with his initials on the driver's-side door...
...And so they would seem to have...
...The word probably showed up most frequently in one of the following two sentences: She has a good attitude...
...T., from the old television show The.A-Team, "I pity the fool...
...Yet in doing so one is engaged in an enterprise likely to be as effective as delivering a sermon on the need for more temperate behavior to a flood...
...In its new meaning, attitude is perhaps the reverse of understated...
...Only human beings—certainly not inanimate objects—had attitudes...
...An invitation, some attitude, and two gutsy dresses...
...In Mark Gauvreau Judge's book If It Ain't Got That Swing, "the beboppers had attitude...
...The questions to ask when a new word enters the language, or an old one is radically changed, are why...
...Wonks with attitude are scarier than the rich," runs a sentence in an op-ed piece in the New York Times...
...The current meaning of attitude is useful in denoting a new, in most cases rather mild, sort of non-conformity at a time when it isn't so easy to step out of all the ready-made patterns of custom and style...
...A bit of colorful silk around my throat livening an otherwise standard get-up may be as far as attitude goes with me, but, hey, when it comes to attitude, you have to take it where you can get it...
...That, I do believe, is attitude...
...One passes a green-haired, heavily tattooed, multiply pierced youth in the street and, after a brief wave of revulsion, yawns...
...A few of his wealthy friends owned the more understated but not much less expensive Bentley, but O'Hara decided: "None of your shy, thumb-sucking Bentley radiators for me...
...In Wired, a new basketball shoe is said to turn "on-court attitude into courtside casual...
...It's calling attention to yourself: Yo, look at me...
...T., in his mohawk haircut, his ample, well-defined muscles festooned in gold, had attitude in sweet excelsis...
...Do the pro football players Brett Favre and Warren Sapp...
...Does Michael Jordan have attitude...
...English is only my first language...
Vol. 6 • September 2000 • No. 1
