Big Red Boots And Nepo Babies
The Word Collector — part 9
Regular readers will know that I love collecting new words, phrases, acronyms and sayings.
The following have been collected this week for your amusement, enlightenment, and delectation.
NSA — this acronym actually refers to the top-secret National Security Agency in the US, or top-secret until Edward Snowden rather lifted the lid. I was amused to see the acronym used this week to mean “No Such Agency”, though it is a bit late for that now!
Condign — (of punishment or retribution) appropriate to the crime or wrongdoing; fitting and deserved.
Gibbous moon — already vaguely familiar but I had to look this up to check — the phase of the moon in which its illuminated part is greater than a semicircle and less than a circle.
Diaphanous — light, delicate, and translucent — is often used to describe dragonfly wings or very light material.
The Fourth Estate — I had come across this before but if you have a memory like mine you have to look things up again — refers to the press and news media.
Nepo baby — the nepo is short for nepotism, so a nepo baby, if you didn’t already know, is the baby of one of the stars, who is likely to have great success for just having celebrity parents, though this term is perhaps unkind if they are genuinely talented. Examples might be Stella McCartney or Brooklyn Beckham The phrase was used recently in connection with Robert De Niro becoming a father at the grand age of 79. I guess this is one option if there are no grandchildren! Grammarly is suggesting I mean repo baby which would be something else entirely.
Big Red Boots meme — I am usually the last to hear about such things since I don’t get out much, so you probably know all about this one already. They’re big, they’re red, and they’re everywhere. Big red boots have taken the internet by storm, with countless celebrities sporting them and they are giving rise to lots of memes. MSCHF, the Brooklyn art collective that birthed the boots, calls them “cartoon boots for a 3D world.” According to the product description:
“Cartoonishness is an abstraction that frees us from the constraints of reality. If you kick someone in these boots they go boing!”
That is the explanation, but I still don’t get it!
Bisociation — the simultaneous mental association of an idea or object with two fields ordinarily not regarded as related
That’s it for this week, and I hope you enjoyed them. In case of interest, a link to my previous article in this series is below and includes a link to other collections.
As always, thank you for reading.
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