January 2009
Porn reborn
Porn is everywhere. Not the flesh-coloured, top-shelf variety, although there is certainly a fair bit of that around – I'm talking about something much more exciting: the word itself. Porn is popping up in all sorts of unusual places, but these days people are using it to describe things farther and farther removed from sex. This linguistic perversion first came to our attention with property porn, which appeared in 2002 as journalistic shorthand for all that drooling over imposing Victorian semis, exposed bricks, and so on, that was so prevalent in the Sunday supplements. And just the other day I stumbled across its latest mutation when a critic dismissed Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's Dickensian blockbuster, as 'poverty porn'.
So, in the interests of lexical analysis I took a deep breath, had a quick glance left and right, and typed the word 'porn' into the Collins Corpus to see what other terms are placed immediately before it in today's English. At first the results seemed a bit of an anticlimax. The vast majority of examples were, as any sane person might expect, concerned with old-fashioned, maiden-aunt-offending pornography; the word one place to the left either set out the content of the porn in question, or the method of delivery. I need not go into details about the full range here, except to report that the most intriguing was character-driven. But closer inspection did reveal some unusual collocates in the property porn mould. It seems that in a modern broadsheet article you might come across bike porn and car porn (magazines and features about expensive consumer items), torture porn and gore porn (films such as the Saw series and Hostel), docu-porn and doom-porn (documentaries that portray natural disasters, physical deformities, etc, with morbid relish), and, topically, climate porn and financial porn (sensationalist doomsaying about the planet and its finances respectively).
What's going on? Ten years ago food porn meant Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, and maybe even Marlon Brando. Now it's Nigella and those breathy Marks and Spencer adverts. These days you could interpret kitchen porn any of three ways - and only one of them would plausibly involve nudity. Like all language change it's a gradual evolution. It's a simple enough leap from, say, a girlie magazine to property porn, with its glossy pictures of unattainable fantasy. Climate and financial porn are just borrowing the word's unsavoury reputation to suggest a sense of unhealthy and indecent relish in the subject, while the more visual poverty and docu-porn perhaps fall somewhere in between.
At the moment the Collins English Dictionary definition of pornography is strictly literal, but there's more than enough evidence for us to reword it to cover this figurative use.
There now, have I used the magic word enough times to improve our search-engine rating?
Cormac McKeown - Head of Content
Porn is everywhere. Not the flesh-coloured, top-shelf variety, although there is certainly a fair bit of that around – I'm talking about something much more exciting: the word itself. Porn is popping up in all sorts of unusual places, but these days people are using it to describe things farther and farther removed from sex. This linguistic perversion first came to our attention with property porn, which appeared in 2002 as journalistic shorthand for all that drooling over imposing Victorian semis, exposed bricks, and so on, that was so prevalent in the Sunday supplements. And just the other day I stumbled across its latest mutation when a critic dismissed Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle's Dickensian blockbuster, as 'poverty porn'.
So, in the interests of lexical analysis I took a deep breath, had a quick glance left and right, and typed the word 'porn' into the Collins Corpus to see what other terms are placed immediately before it in today's English. At first the results seemed a bit of an anticlimax. The vast majority of examples were, as any sane person might expect, concerned with old-fashioned, maiden-aunt-offending pornography; the word one place to the left either set out the content of the porn in question, or the method of delivery. I need not go into details about the full range here, except to report that the most intriguing was character-driven. But closer inspection did reveal some unusual collocates in the property porn mould. It seems that in a modern broadsheet article you might come across bike porn and car porn (magazines and features about expensive consumer items), torture porn and gore porn (films such as the Saw series and Hostel), docu-porn and doom-porn (documentaries that portray natural disasters, physical deformities, etc, with morbid relish), and, topically, climate porn and financial porn (sensationalist doomsaying about the planet and its finances respectively).
What's going on? Ten years ago food porn meant Kim Basinger, Mickey Rourke, and maybe even Marlon Brando. Now it's Nigella and those breathy Marks and Spencer adverts. These days you could interpret kitchen porn any of three ways - and only one of them would plausibly involve nudity. Like all language change it's a gradual evolution. It's a simple enough leap from, say, a girlie magazine to property porn, with its glossy pictures of unattainable fantasy. Climate and financial porn are just borrowing the word's unsavoury reputation to suggest a sense of unhealthy and indecent relish in the subject, while the more visual poverty and docu-porn perhaps fall somewhere in between.
At the moment the Collins English Dictionary definition of pornography is strictly literal, but there's more than enough evidence for us to reword it to cover this figurative use.
There now, have I used the magic word enough times to improve our search-engine rating?
Cormac McKeown - Head of Content
posted by Collins Language @ Wednesday, February 04, 2009
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