| 单词 | edgy |
| 例句 | edgy adjective 1.•everyone was edgy as the deadline approached:tense, nervous, on edge, anxious, apprehensive, uneasy, unsettled | twitchy, jumpy, keyed up, restive, skittish, neurotic, insecure | irritable, touchy, tetchy, testy, crotchety, prickly | informal uptight, wired, snappy, strung out. ANT calm. 2.•an edgy new novel:cutting-edge, on-the-edge, fringe, avant-garde, innovative, original, offbeat | gritty. ANT conventional.WORD NOTE edgy, hip There are fake words. One of them is edgy, as New York Times columnist David Brooks notes in today's paper (October 25, 2003). “Edginess,” he writes, “is the garment that mainstream institutions wear when they want to look slightly but safely rebellious.” Possibly so, but maybe the more salient point is that it remains a cultural imperative to rebel, or to be perceived as rebellious, as if James Dean in Rebel Without a Cause or Marlon Brando in The Wild One were better examples to follow than such models of rectitude as, say, Gregory Peck as a journalist fighting prejudice in Gentleman's Agreement or Gary Cooper enforcing the law in High Noon. I remember the year everyone began using the word •edgy. It was 1996. An Anne Klein chemise had an edgy look. A few years later you heard the word used routinely by film critics and book reviewers. An edgy movie was deliberately off-center and had a dark side. David Lynch made edgy movies and TV shows. Mulholland Drive featured a fractured, dreamy narrative that took radical, unexplained turns. It was weird but in a hip way. Hip would be the ultimate word in this category, a word in such universal use that it may be destined toward the oblivion that follows overexposure. But hip had a kernel of meaning at one time, and a core of mystery, that continues to beguile. To Norman Mailer the distinction between hip and square seemed all-important. I remember, from an essay of his that I read in high school, that in various categories of taste and judgment, from music to philosophy, there was a square paragon and a hip one. One of Mailer's examples sticks all these years later: D. H. Lawrence was hip, Aldous Huxley square. I have given up trying to figure out why. Maybe it was that Lawrence represented seduction by touch and Huxley by talking the girl into it. The widespread use of hip as a term of praise today may mean nothing less than the defeat of the straight. No one wants to be straight if the alternative is hip. Straight implies narrow-mindedness and a lack of curiosity. Hip are jeans, hip-hugging or not. Straight is a suit—a word increasingly used to denote not clothes but the person wearing them: a faceless, characterless fellow, perhaps an accountant or lawyer, in the company's employ. Better to be hip and in the know, on the cusp, ahead of the curve, especially if you can project an edgy appearance. There's a moment in his 1956 rendition of “You Brought a New Kind of Love To Me” when Frank Sinatra substitutes the words “I'm hip” for “I know.” That's a smart use of the word. The greatest parodic use I have ever seen was in the headline of a little story about the late Sammy Davis, Jr., original member of the Rat Pack. The story was about his having hip reconstruction surgery. The headline: “Sammy Davis to Get Hip.” — DLConversational, opinionated, and idiomatic, these Word Notes are an opportunity to see a working writer's perspective on a particular word or usage. |
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