The P-Word

[Dave Monroe]

>From Geoffrey Nunberg, Going Nucular: Language,
Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times  (NY:
Public Affairs, 2004), Ch. 1, "Plastics!," pp. 3-7 ...

"We're all attuned to the word games that other people
try to play on us--what we have to watch out for are
the ones we play on ourselves.  Consiedr the curious
transformation of plastic.  For the first part of the
twentieth century, that word connoted all the
blessings that science was bestowing on modern life. 
Then, forty years ago, it suddenly became the P-word,a
nd synthetic materials started having to deny tehir
paternity.
   "The American enchantment with synthetics began in
the 1920s ...."  (p. 3)

   "But technological predictions have a way of going
awry. Within a short time, 'plastic' would become a
problematic word. (And so too would 'housewife,' for
that matter.)
   "The break in the filament was signaled in two
events in 1963. In the fall, DuPont introduced the
leather substitute Corfam at the Chicago Shoe Show.
Then it made the material the centerpiece of its 1964
World's Fair pavilion, which was a triumph of
synthesis from its Tedlar roof and Delrin door knobs
to its Mylar curtains and Fabrilite seat upholstery.

[...]

   "But Corfam was a marketing catastrophe. A few
years later DuPont took a $100 million write-off and
sold off its Corfam operation to a company in the
People's Republic of Poland, where the fabric quickly
became the cynosure of captive-nation haute couture."
   "People had good practical reasons for rejecting
Corfam, which didn't breathe or break in the way
leather did. But the material was also the victim of a
more equivocal attitude toward synthetic products.
   "As it happens, in fact, 1963 also recorded the
first use of the word 'plastic' to refer to something
superficial or insincere. By 1967, the nation was
snickering at the line in Mike Nichols' 'The
Graduate,' where a skeptical young Dustin Hoffman
received career advice from a family friend: 'I just
want to say one word to you.... Plastics!'
   "That line marked the end of America's innocent
faith in the synthetic future: From then on, 'plastic'
would be charged with a curious ambiguity.  For the
hippies and later the greens, the word stood in for
all the wastefulness and superficiality of American
consumer culture. It was an obvious metaphor. As
Stephen Fenichell puts it in his lively social history
Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century, plastic
embodies the features that people like to denigrate
about the twentieth century--artificiality,
disposability and synthesis.
   Frank Zappa sounded that note in his 1967 Plastic
People: 'I'm sure that love will never be / A product
of plasticity.' ..." (pp. 4-5)

http://www.thatsracin.com/mld/mercurynews/news/editorial/4878499.htm

http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com/publicaffairsbooks-cgi-bin/display?book=1586482343

Fenichell, Stephen.  Plastic: The Making of a
   Synthetic Century.  NY: HarperBusiness, 1996.

http://www.salon.com/sneaks/sneakpeeks960716.html

Frank Zappa, "Plastic People" (1967)

http://www.mindfully.org/Plastic/Zappa-Plastic-People.htm 


	
		
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