Occasionally we’ll get upset about politics, religion, literacy, or some other similar Big Important Thing about which most people have strong, heartfelt, and fantastically uninformed opinions that usually involve accusing you of being some sort of jackbooted religious hypocrite or an America-hating fascist socialist, depending on how exactly you choose to disagree with them. Usually, though, we tend to dwell on punctuation mistakes, bad grammar, and poor word choices, like when people write “could of” when what they really mean is ”could’ve.”1
Or to give a better example: not too long ago, before it was co-opted by marketing departments and turned into ridiculous marketing catch-phrase, the word decadent actually had a real meaning. It wasn’t a particularly positive one, either. According to Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary, decadent means, as an adjective,
1: marked by decay or decline (as from an earlier condition of excellence or vitality): as a: characterized by self-indulgence [a rich and decadent aristocracy]and as a noun,
1: one that is decadent, especially : one characterized by or exhibiting the qualities of those who are degenerating to a lower type or of an age that is on the decline.We haven’t measured this scientifically or even unscientifically, but ourguess is that until recently, the word decadent was used primarily to describe the state of the Roman Empire right before it was overrun by barbarians and collapsed—as Eddie Izzard might say, “like a flan in a cupboard”—living on only as a historical object lesson about the societal dangers of unchecked hedonism.
Scholars divide the history of the Roman Empire into five distinct periods, which are as follows:
- Republic: awesome.
- Empire: more powerful, but not as awesome for fans of, you know, rights and law and stuff.
- Decadence: you may think it’s awesome, especially if you’re a fan of vomiting, fiddling, burning, and/or orgies, but society is coming down all around you, which begins to be lame once you start noticing it.
- Being overrun by barbarians: totally lame.
- Spending a thousand years being compared to every powerful nation on Earth in a very preachy “they’ll get what’s coming to them” sort of way: lame.
So Rome, rotting from within and collapsing from the weight of its own debauchery,2 is a prime example of what decadence used to mean. Now, though, thanks to the ubiquitous dumbing-down power of advertising, decadence means one thing and one thing only:
Chocolate.
Yes, that’s right, the symbol of moral and societal decay now means “yummy.”
But don’t just take our word for it, see and listen for yourself. As far as we’re concerned, the woman in this Hershey’s Bliss commercial says it all—and says it with a deep, sultry, throaty delivery that makes it clear that, if she had the chance, she wouldn’t think twice about slinking seductively out of your television set, tearing all her clothes off, and making slow, unbridled, passionate love . . . to your dessert.
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