Is Calling Someone a “Bright Young Thing” Really a Compliment?
January 6, 2015 by admin
Filed under Lingerie Events
Then there’s firecracker. You want to be called a firecracker, I think? If you’re a woman, it means that the speaker approves of you. He (it’s usually a he) finds you feisty, energetic, opinionated, and honest. You also may be on the petite side, like a compact paper cylinder packed with explosives. The point is, it’s cute when you yell! (Meanwhile, if you’re a man and someone calls you a firecracker, you are either the singer Miguel or John Fletcher, the Human Firecracker, who over years of performances has lit more than 600,000 fireworks off his body.) Likewise, while plenty of men have been described as “whip-smart”—including Andrew Sullivan, a “whip-smart voice of reason in the racket that is the blogosphere,” George Clooney, and the all-guy band OK Go—the word is more frequently attached to members of the second sex: Ellen Page, Gail Collins, Elizabeth Warren, Rachel Maddow, modern moms, a wise-cracking dominatrix, Lisbeth Salander. This gender imbalance may have something to do with Liz Phair’s 1994 album Whip-Smart, which gave the adjective a lasting feminine shine. But it may also relate to how the compliment, while not backhanded exactly, suggests a level of inexperience or unrealized potential that is absent from more masculine terms like wunderkind. Watch out for the wunderkind: He’s a genius, and he’ll eat your lunch. The whip-smart new hire seems a little less threatening—unproven and rough around the edges. If wunderkind implies you should bow down, then whip-smart says “don’t count her out just yet.” She may not look like much, but perhaps she’ll prove to be more than the latest bright young thing.
