I don’t believe I have attitude, but I do own at least one bow tie that does. Some readers will wonder if that sentence isn’t missing an indefinite article. Shouldn’t it be “an attitude”? For anyone who feels the want of that indefinite article, I can only say, in the mortal words of Mr. T., from the old television show The A-Team, “I pity the fool.” Mr. T., in his mohawk haircut, his ample, well-defined muscles festooned in gold, had attitude in sweet excelsis.
The word attitude has undergone a big change. The word’s core meaning used to be “a mental position in regard to a fact or state,” with that position often charged with feeling or emotion. The word probably showed up most frequently in one of the following two sentences: She has a good attitude. And: I don’t like his attitude. A certain malleability was also implicit in the old meaning of the word, the assumption being that one could alter, change, perhaps completely reverse one’s attitude. Only human beings — certainly not inanimate objects — had attitudes.
No longer. “The most important thing today,” says the designer Stefano Gabbana, “is attitude.” In Harper’s Bazaar, the blurb for a piece called “Party Favor” reads: “What does it take to pose as the latest girl? An invitation, some attitude, and two gutsy dresses.” At a Texas Rangers-Chicago White Sox game in early August, a fan held up a sign reading, “Attitude Is Everything.”
That is the problem: Semantically, the word is all over the place, popping up everywhere and meaning everything. No two people seem to agree on its meaning, or at any rate on its new meaning. “Wonks with attitude are scarier than the rich,” runs a sentence in an op-ed piece in the New York Times. In Wired, a new basketball shoe is said to turn “on-court attitude into courtside casual.” In Mark Gauvreau Judge’s book If It Ain’t Got That Swing, “the beboppers had attitude.” What can all this mean? How should I know? English is only my first language.
Does Michael Jordan have attitude? Do the pro football players Brett Favre and Warren Sapp? I suspect all three do. In its new meaning, attitude is perhaps the reverse of understated. It’s the bold, the outre, violating convention and propriety, but doing so by design, unashamedly. It’s taking joy in outrageousness. It’s calling attention to yourself: Yo, look at me. It’s in-your-face arrogance, deliberately unchecked, but arrogance in a (somehow) winning form.
That objects — cars, clothes, shoes, wristwatches — can have attitude is a help in locating the word in its new meaning. The novelist John O’Hara promised himself he would buy a Rolls-Royce if he won the Nobel Prize. When it became clear he wasn’t going to win it, he bought the car anyway, a four-door Silver Cloud III, dark green, with his initials on the driver’s-side door. A few of his wealthy friends owned the more understated but not much less expensive Bentley, but O’Hara decided: “None of your shy, thumb-sucking Bentley radiators for me. I got that broad in her nightgown on my radiator and them two R’s, which don’t mean rock ‘n’ roll.” That, I do believe, is attitude.
One can of course bemoan the sloppiness of standards that allows a long-established word suddenly to take on a new meaning. Yet in doing so one is engaged in an enterprise likely to be as effective as delivering a sermon on the need for more temperate behavior to a flood. By its nature, language, as in the Paul Simon song, has this tendency to go slip-sliding away. The questions to ask when a new word enters the language, or an old one is radically changed, are why? why now? and who needs this?
The current meaning of attitude is useful in denoting a new, in most cases rather mild, sort of non-conformity at a time when it isn’t so easy to step out of all the ready-made patterns of custom and style. Niche-conformity, another new phrase, implies that all groups, no matter how ostensibly far out, have their own strict rules. And so they would seem to have. One passes a green-haired, heavily tattooed, multiply pierced youth in the street and, after a brief wave of revulsion, yawns. That’s not attitude — that’s merely conformity to something deeply repulsive.
Attitude is my Jelly-Belly red and white, unevenly polka-dotted, giant butterfly bow tie. It was given to me by a friend, and I wear it with pride, regretting only that, it being a bow tie, I cannot look down upon it myself to derive the small pleasure it seems to give others. When I wear it, strangers have been known to smile as I pass. “Like your tie,” a woman said to me in New York. “Wild tie, man,” a kid remarked in Chicago. “That’s great,” another woman said, pointing at my tie in Bozeman, Montana. A bit of colorful silk around my throat livening an otherwise standard get-up may be as far as attitude goes with me, but, hey, when it comes to attitude, you have to take it where you can get it.
JOSEPH EPSTEIN
