Naff: A Rumination on Taste and Tastelessness
2023; University of Missouri; Volume: 46; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/mis.2023.a901084
ISSN1548-9930
Autores ResumoNaffA Rumination on Taste and Tastelessness Grace Plowden (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Lewis Khan [End Page 48] Last summer I went on a Hinge date with a guy from New Jersey. We sat outside a Williamsburg restaurant that called itself an "eatery" and tried to suss each other out over frozen margaritas (mine) and fish tacos (his). At some point, he asked me what kind of music I listened to. I told him I loved shitty music: corny country and sappy pop. He was surprised. Apparently I didn't give off that kind of vibe. [End Page 49] The kind of vibe I did give off likely had something to do with how he received my cut-glass British accent. I have been told that in America, my accent lends me a cool aura of authority. I have also been told that it sounds clunkily polite, in a way that suggests I want everyone to like me. My date asked whether I liked these genres ironically. I told him I didn't think I would have been committed enough to a project of irony to maintain an ungenuine taste for them for the best part of the last decade. I said I did enjoy listening to them, but I was always aware of their shittiness; thus, my pleasure wasn't pure or unfettered but laced with a distance that I guessed I could call guilt or irony or even postirony. There was something taboo about listening to them, yet also something permissive. Some kind of pleasure born precisely from their shittiness. He wondered whether I would have felt the same had I been raised in the States, where lots of people liked these genres in earnest and said so publicly without qualifiers. I thought it likely I wouldn't. The corny and the sappy would be much less fun if they were respected. I'd call these genres "naff"—a subcategory of bad taste that the OED defines generically as "unfashionable, vulgar, lacking in style." When I tried, clumsily, to describe its valences to my date, it became clear that there is no obvious American equivalent. ________ Nowadays, in the UK, allegations of naffness are ubiquitous. The word is so mainstream that I hear it every week, sometimes every few days, depending on where I am, whom I'm seeing, and whom I'm able to eavesdrop on. However, while it is generally acknowledged that "naff" means bad taste, there is little consensus about how naff's bad differs from tacky's and what exactly warrants this particular label. One Urban Dictionary user, jessikuhh, defines the naff as something that is "unbearably out of fashion and nerdy," citing parents trying to dance to 'modern music,' blue eyeshadow, blokes who wear socks with sandals[,] and pigtails. Their fellow forum users were on the fence: the post, when I viewed it, had seventy likes and sixty-one dislikes. Another, Shaowfax2020, leans into the way the term defies articulation, proclaiming it the word for "when you don't like something or someone, but can't really describe why." Their example: Robbie Williams is just a bit naff (six likes, seventeen dislikes). In his essay "Notes on Naff" (2021), Sean Wyer, a Welsh PhD candidate at Berkeley, presents naff in relation to "camp" to describe it to [End Page 50] his American readers. He doesn't discuss this, but it's an interesting tack given that both words came into popular use via Polari, an underground slang prevalent in London in the 1950s. Polari is informed by Italian—"Polari" (aka Palare, Palary, Palyaree) comes from the Italian parlare, v. to talk—and was likely influenced by the significant number of Italians who migrated to London in the nineteenth century. Michael Quinion, the reputed etymologist and founder of worldwidewords.org, argues on his site that "naff" comes from the Italian gnaffa, n. a despicable person, and "camp," from the Italian campare, v. to exaggerate. Wyer's comparison centres on the idea that naff, like camp, is not an idea but a sensibility—one that also hinges on imagined in-groups and out-groups. The comparison is fruitful up...
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