what year is this?
From an article about the Cannes Film festival’s red carpet’s questionable fashion rules (women must wear high heels).
For some reason, every time an injustice unfolds on the Internet, the offended party announces what year it is—as though the wrongdoers are time travellers from a bygone era who will learn the error of their ways the moment they learn the date.
The phrase “this is [the year or decade we are living in]” has always struck me as ahistorical, like all vestiges of a previous time have been eradicated, we are now more enlightened permanently.
The one good thing about it is it is the act of saying it, laying it into various media, makes it apt to become dated. It becomes comical in the way that you hear “It’s the 80s” in a Karate Kid.
So … she’s right. I don’t know that she’s right for the reason I think, but it’s a phrase that should be banished as becoming meaningless. The year is 2015, and something called “stuff” still exists as it did in the 1950s, as it did in the 1830s, as it did in the Hellenistic Period, codified and uncodified, superficial and intrinsic, and on and on.