Procedural criteria

[Benjamin Lukoff]

On Wed, 16 Jan 2008, James Harbeck wrote:

> >"Healthscare" is a new age fraud tactic,
>
> How cute! "New age" is still being used? What's more, its use has, in
> my experience, been limited to straw-man abuse of left-wingers,
> "postmodernists," and other fuzzy chimerae that reactionaries love to
> revile. But in the case of "healthscare" the target is not exactly
> that at all. I'm not entirely sure just why "new age" is being tossed
> in here.

Perhaps it's because I used to work in music, but "new age" means a
musical genre to me first, and it's not a pejorative term. Right behind it
is everything else you might find in a, for lack of a better term,
"neohippie" store such as Seattle's East-West Books
(http://www.ewbookshop.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp), e.g., Paramhansa
Yogananda, Writing Haiku in Response to Sacred Texts, Transform Your Life
through the Conscious Use of Music. Still, though, not pejorative.

If I wanted to criticize lefties and postmodernists I'd use another word,
but not "new age."

Is this a regional thing, or an age thing, or...?

> On the other hand, the idea that there's somehow an official place
> where new words can be recognized is equally cute, almost charming,
> except in that it has a sort of commercial mentality to it -- I made
> this word, so let's see if I can get acknowledgement for it and get
> it out there -- which partakes, really, of the same metier as its
> ostensible demonized subject.

Don't they do this sort of thing in France?

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