Take it from Snee: Decadence is the problem

I pass at least three of these a day in my Toyota Tacoma.

You ever notice how marketers get hooked on words or spellings? Like how everything got a “2000” after it in the ’90s to make it sound futuristic? Or anything beginning with “ex” was spelled with an “X” to remind you of snowboarders skydiving into a live volcano?

If Lever 2000, which is just f##king soap, and the X-wife that took one of your testicles in your divorce taught you anything, it’s that Madison Avenue is lined with useless professionals. By “useless professional,” I mean someone who wears a tie to an office where they produce nothing but email and post-lunch dumps.

This group, more than any, causes me to look at the English language and evaluate which words have been abused and twisted to the point that they no longer have meaning. I’ve termed this, “cleaning out the language gutters,” in the same spirit that Brazilians used to burn street orphans to “end poverty.”

(I may not actually solve problems with the English language, but at least I won’t have to look at the word anymore and think, “Why? Why didn’t I do something?!”)

This week, I’m looking at the latest word to have been chewed up by some undergrad yuppie and spit into our living rooms: decadence.

What You Think It Means: Luxury

There’s a lot of useless s##t sold to us every day, and we used to call them “luxuries.” Fancy cars, dream vacations, ice cream, penis pills and DVD collections of girls going wild: we knew they were worthless, but luxuries are what make life fun. It doesn’t hurt anyone if I spend one paycheck a year on cigarettes, which do nothing for me but make me look cool.

That was all fine and good when there would always be another pay check, mutual funds and property values would only increase and gas prices would always stay low. That was also 2007.

So, how does a company sell you fat-burning pills that don’t work when there’s a perfectly free outdoors to run in and Hardees to stop eating? You market it as a sinful pleasure. “Life’s hard, eat a Dairy Queen Blizzard: it’s decadent.”

What It Really Means: Destroying society through excess

What does decadence mean? It’s the process of becoming or the state of being decadent, and you’re decadent when you self-indulge to the point of decay or decline.

You know how historians write about grotesquely expensive gladiator fights and orgies leading to the decline, split and eventual downfall of the Roman Empire? That’s decadence. Hell, it’s even a Latin word that was coined by monks in the resulting Dark Ages to describe how the Roman vomitoriums and overstretched empire-building screwed them out of widespread literacy and medicine.

Sound eerily familiar?

  • We buy DVD collections of shows we can watch for free on television or online. (We only watch these collections once.)
  • We spend $20 for lapdances, which doesn’t include cover charge or drinks (really, $60) when we can get an actual blowjob for $20 … and that’s the criminalized price!
  • We would rather host expensive, poorly-symbolic tea-parties than run for office.
  • We buy overpriced plastic bottles of water, which often go unrecycled, rather than spend a little extra cleaning up the public water supply.
  • Let’s not forget McMansions: manor homes minus the manor, plus enough rooms for servants, but only three people live in it.
  • We’re an obese, smoking nation that’s in debt and wants health care.
  • Even our churches look like cult compounds. (Wasn’t decadence one of the leading reasons Protestants left the Catholic church in the first place?)

Hell, you want to know decadence? I live in a city that can’t afford to hire new cops, but continues to expand into the surrounding county. I have to drive 20 minutes to get to a real grocery store, but the nation’s largest Victoria’s Secret is within walking distance. Huntsville, Alabama is decadence.

Why Should It Be Retired?

Now, before we go crazy here: I’m not saying that marketers are responsible for the eventual decline of the United States of America. But, they’re definitely celebrating it to sell some f##king Crocs and ring tones. Even if I were to give them the benefit of the doubt, it would still mean they’re using a word without looking it up first.

But using this word to sell products, insidiously or not, is a symptom of wanton behavior combined with ignorance of vocabulary or well-being. While it’s OK to have a couple of vices, marketing every product as a sinful luxury means everything is a “well-deserved break from reality.”

Reality isn’t for everyone; I get that. But a $50 Bath and Body Works bubble bath set won’t change the reality that you’re overindulging when a shower saves water and Mr. Bubble costs $2.

Of course, bath time indulgences won’t hurt the nation, but other decadences, like gratuitous spending in loan companies and lavish “political contributions” do. By describing grapples as decadent, we’ve stripped the very real, very dangerous meaning from a word that describes the exact economic circumstance we’re in right now.

So, if you’re using “decadent” to describe your favorite cookie-flavored vodka, congratulations! You’re an idiot for two reasons.