ColumnAll the words in our language, and you have to keep using these?

Fresh. Fierce. Fabulous.

Smoldering.

Curated. Edited.

The New York Times, smarting from such journalistic inanities, has compiled a list of the most overused words and phrases in fashion writing. (The Times suggests “culled” as the curated of 2011. I vote for “distilled.”)

In addition to those words listed above, the Times takes umbrage at “DIY fashion,” though they must be all right with upcycling (alas, better luck next year, Etsy).

Also popular in a paragraph near you, everyone’s favorite suffix: [Insert noun of choice] -ista. At this point, we’re pretty much anythingistas. Retroista, travelista, foodista, fashionista. It’s surely a bittersweet irony for Scrabbleistas.

Meanwhile, the paper says prefix aggravation came to us in 2010 by way of eco-. Eco-kill me. Ecoista? Now you’re really smoldering, hot pants.

The gray lady is probably right: it’s all gotten a bit redonk.

What are we, Cosmopolitan? When not even Vogue can spell Lafite correctly, I fear for the future of fashion media. (In September Vogue‘s defense, the misspelling was just a hop skip and a bullet point down from a sentence that actually, swear-to-Tyra, contained the words “freshly fierce”, which is clearly to blame for the subsequent “Lafitte.” It’s hard to recover from stupid, even if it is for champagne. I can’t confirm without risking yet another debilitating episode of PTSD, but I am 99% sure there was a certain other f-bomb in that sentence, as well.)

To wit, most holy loathing goes to the most overused word in fashion: Fabulous.

Whenever I hear the f-word oozing from someone’s mouth, I cringe. Lately it’s escalated to full-blown wincing. I’m like Powder; I can pretty much psychically detect when it’s about to be uttered, and I shudder in spasms of editorial pain. You can imagine the situation following the release of Kimora Lee Simmons’ book, Fabulosity.

No really, that scarf is fabulous? An organic diaper is fabulous? Biodegradable picnic plates are fabulous now? Pumpkin. Let me tell you about fabulous, and how not fucking fabulous scarves are. Fabulous is a nine-carat cocktail ring. Fabulous is a trip to the Caribbean on a private jet with the Italian guy you’ve known for five minutes which you’ll never tell your father about. Fabulous is gloves that aren’t safe brown, shoes that aren’t bunion comfortable and dinners that begin at 10 o’clock. That’s a fabulous life. I’m not saying it’s a good life or a moral life or that I’m living it, I’m just saying a scarf by any other adjective is still a square of fabric you wrap around your throat when it’s kinda cold.

Fabulous is not a new tea strainer. It is not a pair of “stylish” comfort shoes that look marginally acceptable enough for public display on weekends with cousins from the weird side of the family. I’ll tell you what else fabulous isn’t: fresh. Used improperly, which it always is, fabulous more closely resembles flab, or flan, or fanny, and bloat and lousy and other words with too much saliva for my tastes. Unless it’s being used to describe something stunningly not normal in any way, you’re just making everyone think the word “bulbous”. Please let’s quit ruining fabulous.

Fantastic isn’t much better than fabulous, but at least it has the advantage of being accurate. You could genuinely find a scarf fantastic, if you’ve just spent the last seven hours freezing your tears out in New York because the airline lost your luggage and you foolishly forgot to stuff that scarf in your carry-on, for example. It’s pretty fantastic to be warm. It’s still not fabulous, though.

There are other words, and classes of words – whole families and clans, in fact – for which I suffer my craft. Portmanteaus reside in a very special tundra in the Arctic-most nethers of my icy heart. For the recent admission of “shopitude,” I apologize to humanity. Someone let the cockles out on that one, and we’ve put them back in the cage where they belong (the cockles!). Portmanteaus are especially insidious; they’re the puns of our time. Let’s stop aggregating syllables and calling it original content. “Refudiate” and “strategery” can be forgiven because they were invented by special people and are only baby portmanteaux anyway, but grellow? Not a value-add.

There are some very nice words out there, like spectacular and lovely and brilliant and modern (as long as it’s not thoroughly or bracingly modern). But so far, deletion hasn’t come to nearly enough worn words. In honor of a new year for new media, and also because this is my post, I’ll start.

Vacay. Die. Die a blunted backspace death right along with info, meds, mod and delish.

Douchebag. Douche. Douchey. Wait for it: Douchebaggery. Every time someone says this from now on, I’m going to respond with “Yeah, what a tampon.” “So tampony.” “Hey guys, I call tamponigans.” (Breaking the portmanteau rule there, but I believe it’s justified.) Think about it, people. Jon Stewart dropping the d-bag every other sentence is not only sort of disgusting, it’s misogynistic in a casual way that makes the “pussy” of 90s popularity seem downright affectionate. Women who can “hang with the boys” say it now, but so do moms. Wow, us.

It’s Official. It’s official: We need to say this next to true things about as much as we need to say “literally”. Which is never.

Superlatives. The Strangest 23 Spoons Found in a Drawer! The 10 Wackiest Drawings by My Cat…This Week! The Boss’s Craziest Text Ever! Let’s give the -est a rest.

Fun with latinates. It’s converse and orient, not conversate and orientate. It’s delicious, not deliciousness. When did we start piling on the extra endings like an order of supersized poutine? How I yearn for six-pack verbs.

Jeggings. Oops, sorry! How on earth and the laws of physics did those manage to squeeze into this tiny little post? God only knows.

Pop of color. It’s simply incredible how good colors look on things. Walls, rooms, outfits, floral arrangements, websites, salads, fingernails, porches, bathrooms, cheeks, children, mantles, macarons, irises. A pop of color as opposed to no color really shakes up the sad ubiquity of blank, empty, invisible and clear we keep seeing everywhere, just running amok. You might wonder how we ever discovered that a pop of color is a good thing? Fact: we still haven’t, which is why we should be grateful to style writers everywhere, teaching us about this fabulously fabulous trick. Life looking a little bland? Spice it up with a pop of color!

Shortcuts by Rachael Ray™. She had me at EVOO – had me middling my brow, and I haven’t the Botox to face the show again. But I wouldn’t be surprised if ready-chopped garlic cloves is now RCGC and one large can of stewed tomatoes is now OLCST and extra handfuls of salt and cheese is a given is EHSCIG. You have to admit, using letters instead of words is a real handy shortcut, sort of like throwing four or five processed foods together instead of cooking a recipe. Sadly, EVOO pops up all over, from mommyblogs to foodie sites to recipe databases. When I had to ask my mother on the fourth time hearing it this Christmas what “The BY” stood for, and learned it’s The Back Yard, I wept and then I drank and then I drank the Nyquil, all of it and then I slept the artificial sleep of morose spearmint misery. I fear this is a battle we’re losing. Well played, Rachael, well played.

This is the first in your editor’s new column for 2011, The Insider’s Guide to Life, exploring topics such as media, culture, sex, politics, carbs and fonts. If she’s got the strength for it, there will be more to come. Cheers and spellcheck!

Image: kennymatic

Welcome to cub web publishing 101, the course for literary teens who go one further than Facebook to flex their writing muscles via blogs devoted to pop culture, fashion and eco activism. Green teen blogging is the new black. But just like the sport of crew, it takes time away from homework. You have to want to get your strokes from more than a bunch of A’s on a card. Meet a few of the new breed.

While most high school freshman call it a day after trudging through the mixed cauldron of Macbeth, ancient Rome and conjugating Spanish verbs, It’s Getting Hot in Here contributor Shadia Fayne Wood blogs about climate justice. At fifteen, she joined the World Summit on Sustainable Development – joining efforts to create the Official Youth Energy Policy Statement. She now helps coordinate a global youth journalism network, Project Survival Media and while keeping a personalblog and pursuing a freelance photography sideline.

At Teens Turning Green, founded in Marin County, CA., concerned teens from around the globe blog to further the goal of  eliminating toxic chemicals from individual lives. Part of the joy is using the art of writing to effect change.

Its co-founder, Erin Schrode, got her start as a “sustainability prodigy” at the website and it led to awards, testimony before lawmakers and paid writing gigs by the time she was sixteen. Now, at nineteen, she is a guest blogger on Dr. Greene and other sites, and has a healthy TTG cosmetic line promoted by Whole Foods.

“They become experts and have something to share, and that is why they are blogging and articulating their perspectives,” says Judi Shill, Shrode’s mom and co-founder of the site. Shill finds blogging isn’t always an entree into journalism but is a sign of the times of how teens today communicate. Still, she admits some of the writing is “extraordinary” – and you can tell who is taking it further.

Taking it further might require the kind of chutzpah displayed by freelance teen reporter, Daniel Wetter, a member of the Scholastic Press Corps who often reports on eco issues. The upstart also has a passion for sports and covered the winter Olympics at fourteen, despite not having proper credentials. That’s the makings of a network sports writer – no shrinking violet in the locker room! “Every day has a new story to cover which is why I love journalism,” he says, and proves it by seeking out stories in his Sacramento community and working for his school paper, The Growler.

And then, in a league of her own, is fashion force Tavi Gevinson. The 14-year-old haute couture devotee, who also covers second hand shopping, has been writing the consumption blog, Style Rookie, since she was eleven. Next stop, a collaboration with Sassy creator Jane Pratt to produce a new teen publication for what Gevinson calls “wallflowery teenage girls.” A profile on the suburban Chicagoan in The New Yorker, points out bloggers have only recently become important in the world of fashion (our own Amy DuFault has the green niche covered), and that Tavi at fourteen is already an old pro who adeptly navigates her away around the backstage of shows, as well as on the web.

“In seventh grade, I’d come home from school and take an outfit picture, post it, write a little bit about it, and write a little bit about the day,” Tavi told the magazine. “Now, I want to write more article-y things.”

Gevinson is able to crossover from silly to serious because luminaries such as Karl Lagerfeld believe the idiosyncratic, four-foot-ten chronicler has something to say, her fresh eye not “ruined by zillions of bad collections.”

Fresh perspective is nurtured at enrichment workshops for kid writers, such as ones held at 826 Valencia, founded by author Dave Eggers and educator, Ninive Calegari. Stanford University’s EPGY (Education Program for Gifted Youth) urges creative wordsmiths to leap into fountains on the Stanford campus and leave anonymous poems on random  bikes.   Lekha School of Writing in San Jose, CA., circumvents the red tape of publishing houses with an adjunct service of publishing works completed by its best students. Some make it into bookstores before the kid has a driver’s license.

Meanwhile, savvy school teachers also play a vital role in prompting talented writers to journey beyond the classroom to reach a wider audience, even if it means a letter to the editor of a local newspaper.

“If students write for an audience of one teacher, they often don’t feel motivated,” says Paul Totah, educator and Director of Communications at Saint Ignatius college Preparatory in San Francisco. “Real world publishing is the best way to inspire good writing.”

Totah, like many of the most insightful instructors, is a former writer who has been in the trenches.

“Whenever I applied for a job as a writer, no one cared what college I went to or what grades or SAT scores I received,” shares Totah. “They looked at my writing portfolio and hired me because of the quality of the writing. Students know they are judged by how well they write anything, from emails to memos to sticky notes, and that concise, powerful prose will serve them in whatever they pursue.”

Edgy and current prose also serves them when selling “article-y things”, catching the eyes of avid Tweeters. But beware of early burn out. It’s a tempting, yet tangled, word wide web we weave, a seemingly endless one at that. The advantage of publishing early comes with a requisite of restraint. Otherwise, prodigies like the Tavi Gevinsons of the world could slide dangerously into child star Lindsay Lohan territory, and risk being washed up before experience and wisdom takes their art to new heights.

Images: Extra Ketchup;  It’s Getting Hot in Here; The Style Rookie; Erin Schrode; Lekha Publishing

It’s no secret that the media tends to focus on the negative instead of the positive, feature problems instead of solutions and evoke despondency instead of motivation. Looking to refresh your optimism?

Ode magazine, ” for intelligent optimists”, offers a healthy dose of inspiration. In each uplifting issue, you’ll find stories regarding active efforts towards a progressive environmental, social and economical revolution, not to mention insightful columns by renowned figures like Paolo Coelho, Amy Domini and David Servan-Shreiber.

Take it from Foreign Policy: “Read Ode, and you may just figure out how to fix this crazy, messed-up world.”

But, that’s not all you’ll gain. Your first issue is free, and, if you subscribe for an annual fee of $19.95, they send you a Thich Nhat Hanh meditation CD and plant a tree in Africa to represent your commitment against global warming.

Plus, recycled paper is used to print every copy and a digital version is available online. (P.S. You can get a good news fix right here, too.)

Image: willsfca