I’ve been writing More Than Words for a long time now, teasing out histories and cataloguing usages and tracing variations, and I’ve reached a conclusion: we need more! More building blocks with which to describe and communicate all of the many ideas and identities we’re constantly generating. More flashcard fillers. More fun toys to pun with.
Identity terms have really hard jobs. Seriously, think about all the things they have to do! There’s that private shine the right one is supposed to have when you call yourself it in your head. There’s the categorical meaning they’re supposed to take on when you use them to describe yourself to other people. And then there’s the baggage each drags along — the baggage of connotation and etymology, baggage that can be useful and positive (when it reminds us of shared community and shared history, for example) or negative (say, when it’s used to stereotype). At some point, privately or publicly, every well-examined word struggles under the pressure. And there’s no group better at thorough public examination than us QUILTBAGs.
Gallup, Inc. was founded by George Gallup in 1935. Gallup was basically the Nate Silver of his time — he came up with a more accurate way to gauge public opinion, and used it to get a nationally representative slice of answers to nationally important questions. After Gallup, Inc. called FDR’s 1936 victory over Alf Landon (a victory that surprised everyone else, including the reputable pollsters at Literary Digest), the company gained wide recognition. Since then, they’ve been completing 1000 interviews per day to keep up with their two main surveys — one on health and well-being, and the second on politics and the economy.
“The more I think about it, the more I think there’s no better person to craft a story about celebrity and about the folklorish narratives we develop about celebrities than the celebrity herself. Not because J.Lo is able to actually shed any light on her life and choices or even really display any genuine vulnerability, but because with all the artifice and spectacle of a project like this, therein lies a certain authenticity. This is exactly how J.Lo wants to be perceived. Through a lens of dreamscape and lore. “This Is Me…Now” isn’t an explanation so much as an abstraction.”
