Bluestockings Unite!

My new favorite word, from Virginia Heffernan’s NYT Magazine column this weekend: marmish. She and Urban Dictionary (which says it has been around since 2006) both consider it a bad thing, but I have actually felt liberated by embracing my marmishness in recent years. Maybe it is the teaching, since students seem to respect organization, lists, and many many marginal notes in a classroom setting in ways they might not in the real world. And isn’t that what the academy (even a rapidly changing, totally digital academy) is for? Marmishness turned up in Michael Winerip’s column too, which suggests that a return to standards might be part of web whatever-point-0 we are up to. I hardly want to align myself with the boomers, but the idea that the evolution of digital media might not only go in a shorter and shorter and sloppier and sloppier direction is appealing. As I was trying to say in my takedown of Nicolai Ouroussoff (I reject the “savage” Curbed plastered on there) not everything that is new and shiny is a good idea, or even progress.

Now I need to go put on my bloomers and ride my bike, scandalizing the neighborhood.