It isn’t until the end of his New York Times article “Who Killed The Catchphrase?,” in which he spends much time discussing the media-consumption behaviors of millennials, that Teddy Wayne gets at what has really contributed to the diminished importance of those infectious punchlines to TV commercials:

We are supplanting the catchphrase with GIF, Photoshop and Vine. As Ms. Fegley said, “It’s been replaced by viral videos and the eight million things we share every day.” The commercial catchphrase, meanwhile, has fallen, and it can’t get up.

At one time, lines like “Where’s the Beef?” or “Yo quiero Taco Bell” ruled not only TV, but were used in print and radio as well. Today, our culture has become increasingly visual, and the easily transferable catchphrase is now the shareable meme-image or video. We’re no longer as interested in listening as we are in looking–but we are still interested in sharing.

On the Times Higher Education website, Belinda Jack derides academic language as cliche that inhibits imagination:

A study out of the University of Westminster on contemporary metal music concluded that this group is made up of (mostly) males who aren’t exactly the most confident people out there:

Those with a strong preference for metal “were also more likely to have lower self-esteem,” the researchers write. They speculate this style of music “allows for a purge of negative feelings,” producing a catharsis that may “help boost self-worth.”

The study focuses on thrash metal today, but heavy metal has always been a distinct subculture, dating back to its birth in working-class Britain. Fans have for decades used the music as a release of frustration and a way to build bonds with others who similarly feel outside the norms of society. At least it was like that when I was a boy.  

According to a new formula devised by the federal government, the number of poor in the United States stands at 16% of the population, not 15% as calculated by the existing, official formula. And without federal programs such as Medicaid and SNAP (oh, no), that percentage would grow significantly.

Reading this, I was reminded of a blog post by Tressie McMillan Cottom on the logic that drives poor people to buy conspicuously expensive things, especially clothes. She recounts this story of how her well dressed mother helped a neighbor work her way through bureaucratic morass of the local social services agency:

The woman had been denied in the genteel bureaucratic way—lots of waiting, forms, and deadlines she could not quite navigate. I watched my mother put on her best Diana Ross “Mahogany” outfit: a camel colored cape with matching slacks and knee high boots. I was miffed, as only an only child could be, about sharing my mother’s time with the neighbor girl. I must have said something about why we had to do this. Vivian fixed me with a stare as she was slipping on her pearl earrings and told me that people who can do, must do. It took half a day but something about my mother’s performance of respectable black person—her Queen’s English, her Mahogany outfit, her straight bob and pearl earrings—got done what the elderly lady next door had not been able to get done in over a year. I learned, watching my mother, that there was a price we had to pay to signal to gatekeepers that we were worthy of engaging. It meant dressing well and speaking well. It might not work. It likely wouldn‘t work but on the off chance that it would, you had to try. It was unfair but, as Vivian also always said, “life isn’t fair little girl.”

Ms. McMillan Cottom is African American, and her blog post addresses how racism exacerbates class insecurity, but as someone growing up in a white, rural, and poor area of Canada (and there are plenty of these, don’t let the “we have health care; we’re better than you” cracks fool you), I’ve seen for myself how being the same race is of little consequence. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the kids teachers dismissed as troublemakers or losers in school showed visible signs of poverty (poor hygeine, old, dirty, off-brand clothes), while kids of doctors and teachers who acted up in similar ways were thought of as simply needing “guidance.”  

A couple of weeks after reading about how music can bolster the academic performance of students in low-income schools comes some depressing news that underscores the importance of using everything at our disposal to close the education gap between rich and poor.

Research by Anne Fernald, as reported in The New York Times, has found that by the age of two, children in low-income communities (where the median income is $23,900) know 30% fewer words than more affluent kids (in areas with a median income of $69,000); this gap in vocabulary can result in serious discrepancy in reading comprehension later on.

On a related note, Dylan Matthews on the Washington Post‘s Wonkblog tells us that those of us brought up in low-income households have brains less able to handle stressful situations and control emotions, according to a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 

Now football referees are doing it too:

When musicians stop concerts because a cellphone ring–example include Christian Zacharias and Alan Gilbert–or unfortunately timed cough they are being disrespectful for both the music and the audience as a whole.

I’ve been at concerts where I’ve had to put up with an errant beep or hack, and although they were annoying, the disruptions have always been quick and minor. What I’ve never wanted is to have a show come to a complete stop, to completely halt the continuity of a piece I’m following. Behavior like Zacharias’s and Gilbert’s puts their own egos above that broader experience of a piece.

We found out this week that George Washington University discriminates against poor people when it picks its freshmen; here’s how it works, as reported by Jordan Weissmann on Atlantic.com:

First the admissions office picks a class based on merit. Then they move some financially needy applicants to the waitlist, which all but amounts to a rejection, and admit richer applicants in their place to make the books balance.

Apparently they are common knowledge to most in the higher-education business, but I also learned all sorts of tricks that schools use to keep out the hoi polloi, such as “gapping,” as described by Inside Higher Ed: 

… only a small subset of colleges pledges to meet the full need of all students they admit. That means that for most institutions, “gapping” has become the norm. That’s when a college admits a student, tells her that she probably needs $X to afford to enroll, and then provides a package that is less than $X–sometimes considerably so.

As Weissmann put it in his Atlantic piece, the point is to send a very direct message to applicants; “kids who fail to take the hint just sink deeper into debt.”

And they sink deeper into debt in part because banks are assholes. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received 3,800 complaints last year from student loan borrowers–primarily Sallie Mae, Wells Fargo, Citi and JPMorgan Chase–about loan services, according to piece on Salon.com. In some cases, the banks lied about refinancing options, ignored requests of students to apply payments to particular loans with higher interest rates, and just plain lied about late payments.