Archives for June 14th, 2007

I guess I do. I don’t know. Are its initials N.V.?

Lea kindly sent me a heads up about the upcoming 2008 Trend Report, whose title page mentions Slovenia. Note that this doesn’t mean that Slovenia is a trendmaker. That possibility was immediately forfeited this past March when the country decided to air Big Brother — about a decade after that show was first popular. (To use an analogy, this would be like …Baby One More Time currently being a popular new hit on Slovenian radio; both Britney and BB were big in 1999.)

And just for the record, I hate all of you sonuvabitches for watching that show. Yes, yes, I know that includes a lot of my friends, colleagues, fellow bloggers, even members of my own family, but still: Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you? Serbia just finished airing its version of Celebrity Big Brother… According to my pop conversion calculator, that means Slovenia will do its own version of that cultural uppercut to the face within a year or two. Our only hope at this point is that some sort of mass extinction event takes us all out before then.

But back to this trends thing. It’s an interesting example of how ambiguous English can be at times. The problem here is how exactly they want to use Slovenia. One could understand the title as two things:

1) Slovenia (and Singapore) are themselves one of the exciting new trends of 2008.
2) Slovenia (and Singapore) are just random geographic markers, i.e. this is a guide to trends from one end of the Earth (Slovenia) to another (Singapore).

I’m curious to know which is correct, but not 400-euro curious. I suppose we’ll have to wait. In the meantime, if Slovenia suddenly gets super trendy or something, please let me know so that I can put my cool face on. The one that says: “Man, I moved to this country before it was the cool thing to do. You new arrivals are all sonuvabitches.”

(Thanks Lea!)