kitsch

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The Word of the Day for March 9 is:

kitsch   \KITCH\   noun
    *1 : something that appeals to popular or lowbrow taste and is often
of poor quality
     2 : a tacky or lowbrow quality or condition

Example sentence:
     On the route up the mountain, there is plenty of kitsch (from teepees
to giant dinosaur replicas) to entice campers to visit the roadside shops.

Did you know?
     "The fashionable clothing label...kicked off the revival last
June..., putting its models in [Carmen] Miranda-inspired swimsuits and
marching them through a gantlet of 50 tons of bananas," writes Mac
Margolis in _Newsweek International_ (January 2006) of a fabulously
kitschy gala commemoration for the late Brazilian singer and actress
Carmen Miranda. Since we borrowed "kitsch" from German in the 1920s, it
has been our word for things in the realm of popular culture that dangle,
like car mirror dice, precariously close to tackiness. But although things
that can be described with "kitsch" and the related adjective "kitschy"
are clearly not fine art, they may appeal to certain tastes -- some folks
delight in velvet paintings, plastic flamingos, dashboard hula dancers,
and Carmen Miranda revivals!

*Indicates the sense illustrated in the example sentence.





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