masscult means the modern industrial equivalent of culture, mass-produced and anonymously consumed, without specialization or connoisseurship. It carries an Arena rating of 1444, earned across 92 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, masscult ranks #704 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #1,425 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #2,890 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #4,359 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words.
Why “masscult” is a great word
MASSCULT — [Noun] The modern industrial equivalent of culture, mass-produced and anonymously consumed, without specialization or connoisseurship. From mass ("large-scale, for the populace") + cult (shortened from "culture"), coined in 1960 by U.S. author and social critic Dwight Macdonald. Unlike "high culture," which demands a disciplined ear or eye, or "midcult," which dresses commercial formulas in borrowed prestige, masscult is openly derivative and engineered for frictionless absorption. It is the antiseptic glow of the television laugh track, the three-chord progression of a billion pop songs, and the scent of buttery popcorn in a thousand multiplexes—a landscape of pleasurable sameness that renders the individual consumer pleasantly negligible, its most profound and democratic seduction.
Etymology
From mass + cult, coined by Dwight Macdonald in the essay Masscult and Midcult (1960).
noun
- The modern industrial equivalent of culture, mass-produced and anonymously consumed, without specialization or connoisseurship.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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