Last year while speaking to a professor about Obama, she mentioned that she had been collecting “flair” pertaining to Obama, and I somehow immediately understood that to mean either real, true baubles or buttons pertaining to the man (like those I continue to see daily on my commute), or, rather, Obama-themed “pieces of flair” from the eponymous Facebook application.
Now today, I read Aaron’s post about eBay and the materiality of flair in Generation: Kill. Yet again, flair was used not as an abstract noun, as in “flair for design,” but as a substantive noun referring to objects worn and denoting identity. We all have one shared instance of flair being used in this way:
But is that the first instance of flair being used like that? Were my professor and Aaron referencing Office Space? Has flair entered into the vocabulary as a noun that refers to things that can be counted?
The OED errs on the side of newness. It gives two definitions for flair that are pertient here:
- An odour, a smell. Obs.
- [mod.Fr.] Power of ‘scent’, sagacious perceptiveness, instinctive discernment. Also in weakened senses: (a) special aptitude or ability; (b) liking, taste, enthusiasm. (Both senses freq. const. for.)
The first definition does not have any incidence after about 1400. The second definition is what gives us “flair for mathematics.” So Office Space, or, more specifically, Stan, seems to use “flair” in a surprising way, one which has moved into contemporary language.
But let’s use the OED‘s clue about “for” to further tease this out by turning to Google:
- “flair for”: 1800k hits
- “pieces of flair”: 71k hits
- “some flair”: 793k hits
- “some flair to”: 202k hits
- flair -for -ric: 5690k
- “of flair” -for -ric: 34k hits
What does this mean? “Flair” still usually commands “for” right after it. The Office Space sense of the word is popular, but much less so. On the other hand, removing the “for” gives almost three times as many incidences of “flair.” But then again, the first 30 Google hits all use “Flair” as a proper noun.
I’d wager then, as a preliminary hypothesis, that using “flair” as a counting noun remains, for the most part, a (tacit, at least) reference to Office Space.
Maybe once I learn how to use Philologic, I can make more interesting searches.
Tags: Barack Obama, language, OED, Office Space
March 18th, 2009 at 9:02
Can’t add to your philology, but I can testify that I was absolutely referencing office space. It occurred to me later that the reference might be lost, but in my own internal lexicon, the term “pieces of flair” is an absolute necessity, given the omnipresence of institutionally sponsored (and neutered) expressions of individuality in our society, bless its dark capitalist heart.
I hadn’t thought much about it though; but now that I am, there is something fascinating about the way a verb, a relation, and an attitude become fetishized as a thing one can possess. In other words, the philology of it nicely illustrates the ways expressions of individuality have to be done through possessions, rather than actions, the ways that commodifying our individuality is what integrates it into the workplace, or whatever.
March 18th, 2009 at 12:21
The potential lost reference is exactly what motivated this brief bit of research. The Facebook application immediately reminded me of Office Space, but I thought I was making that connection alone. Your post, on the other hand, didn’t even connect via OS until I got to the section on Apocalypse Now–the “pieces of flair” in the title whizzed past me.
Rewatching the youtube scene multiple times brought me to the same conclusion about individuality through materialism that you seem to be moving toward.
As far as possessing, the thing is that flair is always something one has (or doesn’t)–it’s an attribution that we ascribe via ownership, because the term doesn’t have an adjectival form. We say, “she’s brave,” not “she has bravery.” But we say, “she has a flair for nobility” (OK, I’m just making these up).
But it indicates that “flair” might be precisely lined up to make the leap to a substantive noun because our interaction with it is already one of ownership (you mention this in your discussion of property–which, btw and interestingly, transcends across multiple European languages, which I learned when researching “Property is theft” in multiple languages).
So maybe that’s why I couldn’t tell if these flair instances were Office Space references or not. Lolcats have already paved the way for abstract/mass owned nouns to become substantive owned nouns, after all (“I has a flavr/fud/moni”). “I has a [piece of] flair” is the next logical progression.
March 19th, 2009 at 10:00
To this I can only add that in swahili, to possess is always expressed as “to be with,” as in she was being with her husband, her savings, or her cow. There isn’t a basic grammatical distinction between to be and to have, although the distinction is hardly unknown in practice. But my swahili is too rusty to remember much more than that.
March 22nd, 2009 at 21:51
The “be” and the “have” distinction is blurred often, to the enjoyment of a lot of lazy pseudo-linguistic arguments, I imagine. It’s strange to me, for example, that they are auxiliary verbs in multiple European languages.
Lately, I’ve been studying Russian, and the form of possession there knocked me over at first: “I have a cat” is indistinguishable from “By me, there is a cat,” with that “by me” being a sort of analog to “chez moi.” For a cat or a computer, that’s one thing. For four brothers or dead grandparents, it’s something entirely different. Meh, I guess there’s no point here, other than “languages are funny.”