Fish in a barrel.
Sunday, July 25th, 2010
photo by Michael Falco for NY Times
Frankly, it seems too easy. Clearly, over at Word Up, YO! they had an advance copy of the New York Times’s Style section which is “graced” this week by….Snooki of Jersey Shore fame.
When I first saw it bright and early this morning, lying there waiting for me and my cup of coffee to pick it up and peruse, I recognized what I was seeing there — above the fold for crying out loud — as a Sign of the Apocalypse. Forget famine, pestilence, earthquakes and the rest….Snooki’s on the cover of the Sunday Style section. Really, it alarmed me. Why, in name of heaven, would the editors at the august Grey Lady decide that this hot mess deserved any more ink? [Aside: Read the article. It’s laugh-out-loud funny and made me feel a bit better: there’s a level of snark in the article that is not often found in a NYT piece.]
I began my morning read-around of the blogs that I follow, and discovered that the Word Up, YO! word of the week is “hot mess.” (Yes, it’s two words. But they must be used together, so let’s consider it a de facto compound word. I’d like to propose HotMess as the alternative spelling.)
I mentioned to my blogging daughter (go see — click here) that she should join in on the Word Up, YO! challenge, as it is a fun way to play with words. “Hot mess” prompted me to mention it to her, since in a conversation we had upon her return from two weeks of a writing camp she unironically and without “air quotes” referred to something she saw there as a “hot mess.” I told her she needs to join the blog hop and write about her camp days. If she’s able to use hot mess without feeling self conscious (I’m not sure I can. I feel like an alarm will go off: “Old lady using young language! Alert! Alert!) then she needs to be writing. Two birds, one post.
So I’m going to do a mini cop out on the Hot Mess Word Up, Yo! meme this week. Now that I’ve got Snooki burned into my corneas, she’s the only HotMess I can think about (it’s like one of those annoying songs you can’t get out of your head, but way worse). And really, if she’s in the NYT — and I’m not — what more can I say?
