It’s rare indeed to find someone whose fascination with the phenomenon of fame exceeds my own storied obsession, but I have indeed located one such sick and deluded soul, and his name is Toby Young. And here is the smartest thing he has to say on the subject, shamelessly stolen from his book The Sound of No Hands Clapping
There are so many different varieties of fame these days we need to develop a whole new vocabulary to describe them. At the moment, the best we can do is to rank celebrities according to whether they’re A-list, B-list, etc. But even if we use every letter of the alphabet that still only gives us 26 different types. That’s surely not enough. Eskimos have 47 different words for snow. Shouldn’t we have 47 words for celebrity?
Selah.
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
: 
raincoaster 
So why is the skull shooting flames out of its eyesockets,and at such close range, how could it miss?
If Toby Young got that close to you, what would YOU do?
He’s just having trouble focusing; you know how much those Brits drink.
Pingback: obsession
Eskimo survival counted on knowing what sort of snow was coming down, had come before, and would be coming soon. Whether or not Brad and Jennifer get together though is not going to effect whether I can feed myself without freezing to death. When celebs have that kind of impact, they can get more vocab attention.
The reason they have so many words is that “Eskimo” is not one language: it’s several dozen.
But if you’re writing a script for Brad and Angelina, knowing whether Jen is a 22 or a 41 is important, no? Besides, you’re talking to a woman who gossip blogs (among other things) for a (bare) living. Being able to express in one word that Kim Kardashian is a useless bundle of carbon and silicone yet still outranks J*l*a A*l*s*n is important to me.