👉 Okay, let’s tackle that wonderfully prickly little piece of linguistic weirdness - "ancerata." (I feel a headache coming on just saying the name; I
adorely
unpack these things.)
What exactly is, and what does this frankly upsetting word mean?
Basically, “ancerata" isn't a real, formally recognised, anything. It started as an aggressively ironic, almost aggressively pretentious, bit of 1980s British slang—specifically amongst the London art scene in the early-mid 2000. The absolutely hysterical origin is that, during a disastrously dull gallery opening, some of these very young and, frankly, rather over-serious young people were trying to describe something that was
absolutely dreadful, pretentious, and utterly, fundamentally bad
. It was meant to be a way, an aggressively, almost comical deflation of the whole scene.
Think of it as a really blunt, over-the-with, spectacularly awful parody of the sort of thing you hear when describing, say, conceptual art. You take something so inane that you feel the need to satirise its own ridiculousness, and then describe it with an outlandish word. It was a very specific, short lived joke.
The term itself comes from the 1957 film, "Ancoats." The name of this film, which was itself about the art scene in that area of north of of London, meant to give you