Glossed Over

Lucky Progress Report: Now Even More Incomprehensible!

To: Lucky

From: Glossed Over

Re: Your progress with the English language

Last month, we discussed your penchant for making up words (which is completely unnecessary, as you’re inventing constructions when words that mean the exact same thing already exist).  Now that you’ve had an issue to consider our suggestions, we wanted to follow up on your progress using commonly accepted American English terms.

First, while the cover didn’t include any freshly invented words, it didn’t exactly inspire confidence.

Grey’s Anatomy’s Katherine Heigl spills her fashion secrets

We understand there was absolutely no way to avoid that double apostrophe.  Obviously, there were serious considerations preventing you from saying something less awkward like, oh, “Katherine Heigl of Grey’s Anatomy,” and thereby sidestepping that quandary.   We can’t think of what those might be, but we’re sure you had your reasons.

Unfortunately, our dismay didn’t end there.  Below, in alphabetical order, is the list of dubious words sprinkled throughout the January issue.

‘50s-ish

aromatherapeutically

chainlet

drapey

fashiony

foresty

Frenchy-chic

gleamy

lipsticky

MySpace-ish

partyworthy (We freely admit to nitpicking here.  “Party-worthy” would be our preference.)

rain-foresty

suitish

un-makeupy

vintagey

zhoozh

We’d especially like to discuss the final entry on the list.  What is this word and what could it possibly mean?  How many editors looked at this and decided it was perfectly comprehensible to the average person who doesn’t actually work at Lucky?  Let’s take a look at the context:

We keep this in the beauty department at all times for last-minute volumizing: Flip your hair over, spritz a few times, and zhoozh with your fingers.

That doesn’t exactly clarify this strange word apparently invented in the heat of a hair-volume emergency.  Is zhoozhing like scrunching?  Is it distributing the product through your hair?  What else could you do with your fingers in this instance? 

We’re stumped.  Perhaps the staff should consider including a Lucky-specific glossary in each issue. Or perhaps it would be easier if we simply give up trying to read the small amount of text in each issue.  From now on, we’ll just stick to the pictures.

Business as Usual: InStyle Elicits Insipid Celebrity Quotes

Reading every single celebrity quote in InStyle’s “See & Be Seen,” December, was a lot like trying to drink a gallon of milk. We didn’t think we could get through it without vomiting.

Fortunately, our worst fears went unrealized, though we did grow a tad nauseated at one point—really, how many Oscars does Hilary Swank have to win before she stops talking about growing up in poverty? At least one more, apparently.

Actually, the buckle on my shoe fell off today. My trailer-park days come in handy every once in a while…I took a lint roller and turned the sticky sheet inside out, then taped it around the buckle and colored over it with a black Sharpie.

Which, incidentally, may have been how she tried to fix her marriage when that fell apart.

Then there’s Mischa Barton:

“I’ve changed so many times in the back of the car, it’s ridiculous.”

Little-known fact:  Mischa Barton was hired for this Bebe campaign expressly because of her experience in changing in the backseats of limos.   After all, anyone who saw even a moment of The O.C. knows better than to expect her to act.

And here’s what another Hilary (what is it about that name?) had to say:

“It’s exciting but something you can handle only twice a year!”

Which, sadly, is only half as often as we’re expected to handle Hilary Duff.

Jane Grooms Its Next Generation of Staffers

We don’t want to impugn the intelligence of Jane readers—though maybe we’d like to impugn the intelligence of Jane staffers. Just a little. Anyway. The true stories shared by readers in December/January’s “Are You About to Be Fired?” make us wonder exactly how these readers manage to be  employed—and how even more out-of-touch Jane must be to consider these workplace tales of adversity even remotely helpful. Or even remotely illustrative of reality.

We give you the story of 22-year-old Heather.

“I always get in trouble for stuff like putting the word yay in an e-mail, or ‘unprofessional’ chitchat, like asking a client with 10 kids if he’s Catholic…”

Guess what, Heather? That’s not ‘unprofessional.’ It’s unprofessional. (Ask a grown-up to explain that one to you, dear, as we’re sure the finer points of punctuation are completely lost on you.) Not to mention potentially offensive and certainly rude.

Then there’s Danielle, who, at 26, is old enough to know better.

“No one seems to have a problem with three-martini lunches, but I guess when it’s 8 a.m., it’s somehow inappropriate.”

Somehow.

And even more galling is that Jane doesn’t take a moment to explain to readers that inquiring about a client’s religion or showing up at work sauced is, you know, generally unacceptable. 

Hey, maybe such behavior is totally okay  at the magazine’s headquarters (and soooo Jane, too!). But why bother to educate the young, impressionable readers in proper workplace etiquette? Someone’s got to grow up and go to work for Brandon Holley.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Allure's Guide to a Merry Mercenary Christmas

It’s that time of the year when caution (and credit card debt) is thrown to the wind. As if Christmas-themed luxury-car ads weren’t maddening enough, Allure’s “Getting the Goods,” December, chimes in with some truly depressing tales of women “who know how to work the system.”

What system is that? Oh, you innocent! It’s that time-honored tradition of shaming your significant other into giving an expensive gift, of course.

Since the article already reads like a manual for aspiring gold diggers, we’ll boil it down to its most important (and most vomit-inducing) points:

1. Men cannot be trusted to purchase appropriately pricy jewelry.

“Never let a man buy you jewelry, never! Like, the stone on the ring is minuscule, and you end up with a chip on your finger! You have to pick it out.”

2. Your friends don’t want crappy presents either. Don’t even think about re-gifting.

“I can tell you what subtlety gets you: a nylon Prada bag…I can’t carry this! This is like everyone’s first Prada bag…I was so pissed, I tried giving it to friends. They didn’t even want it.”

3. Salespeople will happily collude in your money-grubbing schemes—they’re on commission, after all.

“I get a lot of jewelry pieces I would never dream of asking for…including this incredible large aquamarine ring from Verdura, which is so fabulous I can’t tell you what it cost. Well, OK, it cost $30,000. It was the salesman who suggested it to my boyfriend.”

4. If you subsist solely on gifts, you’re absolutely not a whore. You’re just a “successful recipient.”

…the most successful recipient I know…does nothing much for a living except get showered with love—and lovely things: a diamond ring from Van Cleef, Hermes scarves, Bulgari necklaces.

5. Don’t kid yourself by thinking you’re above this sort of behavior.

“Because, I mean, like, I don’t want to sound superficial or anything, but you’re giving me a book! For my birthday?”

6. There’s never an occasion too solemn to practice your exacting gift-receiving strategies. To wit:

“…when he proposed, we were on a beach at night—and I didn’t want to say yes until I took the diamond ring into the light to check it out…Probably I would have married him. But I wanted to know exactly what I was accepting.”

Just follow these six easy steps, and you’re well on your way to a lifetime of expensive gifts and  insatiable rapaciousness.  Now the only question is whether there’s time enough to put these strategies into action now, or whether the truly greedy should resolve to undertake this endeavor in 2007.  Everyone needs New Year’s resolutions, right?

Cosmo: Apparently, the Real World Is Just Like High School

May we direct your attention to the lower left-hand side of Cosmopolitan’s December cover?  Specifically, the part which reads

Below-His-Belt Bloopers!

Hilarious Tales of Inconvenient Excitement 

Hilarious?  Come on, that sort of thing hasn’t been funny since high school.  We even read the article to make sure. 

If a guy holding a book in his lap is supposed to induce laughter, then we fear for the future of comedy. Is this what passes for funny? Two buddies on a road trip, simultaneously turned on by an attractive woman at a gas station.  Golden!  Totally wacky! Is Johnny Knoxville available to star in the movie version?  And can you believe the hijinks that ensue when a 30-year-old becomes excited while dancing with his girlfriend's sister?  Ha!  Involuntary bodily functions are uproarious! 

Still, the very existence of this story was does bolster our heretofore unrevealed theory that Cosmo is written for, and possibly even written by, ninth-graders. This article is pretty much tailor-made for passing around in geometry class.

Memo to Lucky: Stop Existifying Words

To: Lucky staffers

From: Glossed Over

Re: Your, um, creative use of the English language

Lately, a number of you have been failing to use resources writers should be familiar with—we’re thinking of dictionaries, thesauruses, and co-workers—when seeking words to describe the multitude of products you come across every day.  We understand that coming up with a fresh description for each of the dozens of pairs of shoes you encounter must be challenging.

Still, that’s no excuse for flat-out making up words. 

Although you must surely already know this (you did all graduate from high school, yes?), we’d like to take this opportunity to remind staff members that adding –y or –ish to a noun does not make it an adjective.  Also, the origins of the –ify construction are highly specious, and should not be used to make up new words when perfectly acceptable terms that mean the exact same thing already exist. 

In the December issue alone, we found the following violations:

cargo-ish

just-statementy-enough

corset-y

vintagey

glowifier

youthifying

cottagey

loungey

flea market-y 

We must request that you stop this practice immediately, lest your readers develop stress-related aneurysms from trying to parse these too-imaginative constructions.  Worse, these ungodly verbal creations may catch on with the general populace, resulting in “youthifying” skin creams and “loungier” pajamas overtaking the market. (Not to mention the horrible prospect of “flea market-y” being bandied about freely in conversation—we don’t even know what that means.) If finding appropriate descriptors is too difficult for the staff, we suggest Lucky use the J. Crew catalog as a model and consider a shift to a text-free, all-pictures version.

Your cooperation is appreciated.   

L.A. Is, Like, Totally Packed With Hotties, Says Elle

Okay, Elle, we get it. Dating in New York is a Sisyphean endeavor.

Alexandra Jacobs’ article in November’s issue, “How to Marry a Millionaire (or At Least a Successful Screenwriter),” depicts laidback Los Angeles as a single woman’s Shangri-La and a wealthy husband as every woman’s goal. As if that premise alone isn’t suspect enough, the piece heads into highly dubious territory in order to prove its assertion that the West Coast is the place to land a man.

For instance:

The evidence mounts at the Hollywood Wilshire YMCA, where a frizzy-haired, pale-skinned chick is shooting hoops with platoons of eligible men…

Let’s enumerate the wildly erroneous assumptions made in just this one sentence:

One: Ohmygod! A woman playing basketball with men! She must be engaging in an athletic activity solely to capture a man’s attention and not because she actually enjoys the sport.

Two: L.A. must be packed with men desperate for affection if they’ll deign to engage in a totally impersonal activity with a—gasp!—“frizzy-haired, pale-skinned” woman.

Three: Women with frizz and non-fake-orange skin are inherently unappealing.

Four: Men playing basketball in public are obviously single.

And the next sentence:

I almost fall off my Precor when a dark, good-looking character actor stops to ask my sign.

Wait. He asked her sign? And that’s a good thing? Did  Jacobs’ Precor magically transport her to 1973?

(It’s still L.A., okay?)

Ohhhh, it all makes sense now, because everyone in L.A. is, like, totally into astrology and patchouli and, like, you know, the planet and avocado-colored kitchen appliances and fringed vests and stuff.

Then I watch as a guy strikes up a conversation with a woman engrossed in a sweat-drenched magazine—not the vapid glossy Angeleno, but The Atlantic Monthly!

Shocking! Who knew The Atlantic Monthly is even sold on the West Coast? And who could have guessed that men are at all interested in women who display even the most basic signs of literacy?

We suddenly understand why dating in New York is so difficult for Alexandra Jacobs. But after reading this essay, we’re convinced her troubles having nothing to do with her locale.

Holding a Grudge Against Marie Claire

Whoa. Marie Claire’s gone snarky. Take a look at this blurb, one of many, from their “Culture” section, November:

What we won’t be covering this month: Sting’s Songs from the Labyrinth; Employee of the Month, starring Jessica Simpson…

So, let’s get this straight. Marie Claire won’t deign to cover Marie Antoinette, The Santa Clause 3, Rod Stewart, or Evanescence, but they’ll put the star of The Grudge 2 on the cover?

We’re not complaining about their selective coverage. (And, really, aren’t our minds already made up about The Santa Clause 3? Reviews won’t matter.) We’re just saying that they ought to be consistent. We couldn’t possibly stomach reading another drop of ink about Jessica Simpson and her “acting” career, but Marie Claire isn’t exactly increasing its cultural cred by giving the cover to the star of one of the year’s worst-reviewed movies. Apparently, bad movies don’t belong in their “Culture” section, but they’re happy to promote bad movies elsewhere in the magazine.

Cosmo: Turns Out There Is a Substitute for Substance

From Cosmpolitan’s November issue:

Find the Hair That Expresses You

Think you need to be blond to be a bombshell? Or a brunette to mean business? Au contraire. Today there’s a fresh set of rules: Any color can make the statement you want.

Oh, great. We’ve been looking for something to take the place of having an actual personality.

We Read It So You Don't Have To: Marie Claire's Sexy Shocker is Shockingly Old

By special request, this week’s edition of We Read It So You Don’t Have To tackles the article touted on Marie Claire’s August cover as “The Erotic New Trend (Everyone’s Trying It…).”

The “erotic new trend” is fresh, hot, and boundary breaking—or at least it was three years ago. The dated phenomenon MC so breathlessly promotes is this:

Would You Kiss a Girl?

The magazine reveals that 55 percent of its online survey respondents would be intimate with another woman, an answer that shouldn’t surprise anyone who’s seen an episode of The Real World wherein the cast members get drunk. (We realize that pretty much every episode involves the housemates drinking, but that only proves our point.)

More galling than the fact that this topic is no longer interesting is the awkward juxtaposition of  two women who recount their personal experiences with same-sex kissing. One woman is straight and makes out with her friend while drinking at a nightclub. The other woman is a lesbian. Because, you know, a woman kissing her pal to get male attention at a club is totally the same thing as two women kissing because they’re dating.

A caption in the article reads

Madonna did it. Will you?

We say: Madonna did it three years ago. Will you stop writing about it already?