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As a middle-aged movie blogger who eschews Letterboxd and artificially intelligent writing assistants, I do try to maintain contact with elements of pop culture geared toward younger generations. At least where movies are concerned, I feel dutybound on some level to do so. More than that, though, the desire stems from my genuine interest in art and, by extension, a genuine interest in what (some) younger artists are up to and because I have always promised myself that as I age, I will not forget what it was like to be young. I will not fall into the Boomer vs. Millennial and/or Gen Z trap. Still, there are plenty of moments when I must admit to my brewing inner-old fogey. Like the phrase low key for instance. I started hearing the yutes say this all the time a while ago and was pretty sure I understood it to mean something niche. If, say, there was a really good taco place in your neighborhood that only a few people knew about then you’d say, “low-key, they make the best tacos in the city.” Except then Friend of the Blog Christy explained that her children had begun saying high key in addition to low key and that high key and low key appeared to be interchangeable. Wouldn’t this suggest that low key or high key as a modifying adjective is superfluous? Isn’t this just like the President applying excess adverbs to everything?
My notions of modern slang only grew more confused this week when I read Marie Solis’s piece at The New York Times examining the phrase “kinda chic” proliferating on Instagram and TikTok. This phrase, as Solis noted, was essentially in opposition. “Chic,” Solis wrote, “is a high bar,” and dug up an 1877 definition on the Times’ own site to prove it: “What is chic may, in a sense, be fashionable, but what is fashionable cannot be chic.” “(T)he deliberately lowbrow use of ‘kinda,’” Solis explains, “undercuts the less attainable state of ‘chic.’” The BBC spoke to a psychologist from Durham University, Dr. Niklas Ihssen, who summarized utilizing the phrase kinda chic as “allow(ing) you to be special while being normal,” which echoes how the ever helpful Know Your Meme describes it. Chic had always seemed to me an either/or proposition, either you are chic or you are not chic. To be kinda chic sounds like being, I dunno, kinda rock ‘n’ roll. Is being kinda rock ‘n’ roll, in fact, being rock ‘n’ roll in this brave new world? Is everything a half-caf from Starbucks now?
Yet, in being confronted with such revisions in terminology, I did not simply want to sigh, throw my hands in the air, and theoretically scream, “Get off my lawn!” by logging off. I wanted to know. And so, being a movie blog, after all, I decided to try and contextualize high key, and low key, and chic, and kinda chic on my terms.
Let me see if I understand this...
High key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.
Low key, Nicole Kidman is our greatest working actor.
Chic is Audrey Hepburn in all black in “Charade.”
Kinda chic is Jennifer Love Hewitt in “I Still Know What You Did Last Summer” after several introductory fakeout jump scares to communicate that her character is still in the throes of TRAUMA taking a bag of potato chips to bed.
