Fragments

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A twisting examination of life under late capitalism and the deceptions we inhabit to invent our own success stories.

- marketing copy for True Failure, by Alex Higley

I'm working on a review of True Failure at the moment. A good novel, but this bit of copy in the marketing materials from Coffee House caught my attention.

This construction of Progressive Standard English: “Under” + Bad System.

We are “under …”

We are “under …”

We are under these systems only in as much as we hold them up. It would be an option to stop validating them—particularly in such helpless forms as the “under” construction—and instead imagine, advocate for, and demand something more appealing.

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Its roots, of course, go back even further – it’s borrowed from the Greek kakistos, or “worst”, which itself probably comes from the Proto-Indo-European word kakka, meaning “to defecate”.

In other words, as Nancy Friedman wrote at her blog on language in 2016, “you could say that kakistocracy is ‘government by the shitty’.”