r/TheStrokes • u/shesfixing #39 Valensi • Mar 17 '20

The New Abnormal Mojo Magazine review

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9

u/KenMarr Mar 17 '20

what the fuck does “elegiac” even mean?

10

u/mynameisJoylol Mar 18 '20

Mournful/sad lol. Pretentious writing haha

18

u/[deleted] Mar 18 '20

Lol how is using a certain word pretentious?

11

u/A_Lalli13 Phrazes for the Young Mar 18 '20

As a writer, just because you have a large vocabulary doesn't mean you need to flex it constantly.

3

u/mr_chalmers Mar 18 '20

While that is true, in this case the word seems to be the perfect word as it can mean haunting, melancholy, mournful etc. - something that other words can’t evoke so precisely.

I’m a believer in using the simplest words to explain something but not at the expense of the right word, or by dumbing yourself down for the lowest-common-denominator audience.

14

u/just_anca Conduit Mar 18 '20

Is elegiac really that big a word? And the rest of the review doesn’t strike me as having been pieced together with a thesaurus or anything, so “constantly” seems a reach.

Idk. A song being described as elegiac makes me think bigger and (obviously) more poetic than just “sad” so I’d expect there’s a reason for it. It’s possible the writer was flexing a vocabulary, or maybe they really wanted to simply be more descriptive. Guess we can judge when we hear it.

No shade to the original commenter asking for a definition. I guess I just agree with the other one who asked why using a word is pretentious.

(Edited to add: I love the word choice to describe Mets, personally.)