Hear this episode and find more information about the topics and guests at theallusionist.org/celebrity
This is the Allusionist, in which I, Helen Zaltzman, buy language a certificate showing that it is the owner of a plot of land on the moon. Then am surprised that language is able to secure planning permission to build a four-bedroom house on it.
In today’s show: terrifying beasts! And some words that we all know but are surprisingly difficult to define, ooh, lovely!
On with the show.
GREG JENNER: Our language for celebrity is so confused and so muddled. The word ‘celebrity’ itself has ancient roots in some ways, it comes from 'celeber', meaning honoured or or well-known. That's an ancient Roman word. But it didn't have that kind of meaning that we think of now. And the strange thing is that a celebrity in the medieval world, up until the 1500s, was a solemn occasion. So a parade or a coronation would be a ‘celebrity’. And then in the 1600s and early 1700s, the meaning changed: it becomes ‘to be well-known’. So a celebrity didn't exist yet. You couldn't be a celebrity, but you could have celebrity, so you could have a reputation of being well-known. It's not until the 1840s that we actually get people being called celebrities.
HZ: Our favourite historian Greg Jenner is back! And he has written a very entertaining new book Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen. Greg, this might sound like a silly question, but: what IS a celebrity?
GREG JENNER: Celebrity is very broad and encompasses all sorts of different levels of talent and skill.
HZ: Just take a moment to try to define the word ‘celebrity’ - go on, do it - it’s not a synonym for a famous person, maybe a subset of fame? Even though he wrote the book on it, it wasn’t easy for Greg to define.
GREG JENNER: It took me eight months to come up with my own definition. And that's not to say that no one in history has ever tried before. Of course they have. People have been trying to define it for a long time, for many decades. But the truth is, is that when I was doing the early research, I was reading around, reading all the sociology and all the scholarship, and nobody agreed. There just wasn't a consensus on what a celebrity is. I think celebrity: I think it requires five boxes to be ticked. So box number one is you have to have unique charisma or a unique personality, something distinctively you. And I'm assuming we're talking about you here, Helen, I'm going to make you a celebrity in this case study.
HZ: Sure, that's believable.
GREG JENNER: The second thing, is your name needs to be disseminated widely so that strangers know who you are. So that is a strange thing in itself. But people who do not know who you are need to know who you are. And there's a kind of inherent paradox in that. But that's what celebrity is, is when people in the street who you've never met come up to you and go, "ooh, I know who you are, can I take a selfie?"
The third thing is you need the involvement of the mass media. And so that is essentially newspapers in the 18th century, certainly. And then, of course, later on you get the birth of reproduction imagery: photography, radio, telegraphy, later on, film, television, the internet, that kind of stuff, social media. The celebrity can exist in multiple places at once: they are reproduced and they are disseminated through this large technological infrastructure.
Fourth point is a really crucial one. You have to have a fascination with the private life of the individual. The celebrity is not just someone that you recognise off the TV, because that can be renown, and renown is different. Renown is respect or notoriety that is positive - or negative - that comes about from your work, from your career, from what you've achieved; but it may not have any kind of personal zing to it. Renown might well be that you can kind of go, you know, we all know who Bill Gates is. We all know in the UK we know who David Attenborough is. David Attenborough is sort of the greatest, most beloved person in the UK. But he's not a celebrity, because we don't know anything about his private life. We don't know anything about his family, where he holidays, what car he drives, we've never seen him in a bikini. There's no fascination with his personal private life. What we care about is his work. So that's renown, not celebrity. So the fourth check point is you've got to have a love or a curiosity for the personal. And we treat celebrities as human box sets. We talk about them as if they are soap operas, as if they're scripted reality, as if they're not real people at all but someone is pulling strings and writing their storylines for them. So that fourth point is really crucial.
And the fifth point is the most important of all, probably; and that is an economic marketplace attached to their fame. So it's not enough to be famous and to be able to make money by selling books or charging people money to come and see you in concert. That's great. That's lovely. But celebrity, for me, is when other people can make money from your fame. So when there's a parasitic economy attached to it, so: celebrity generates capital, it generates money and profit for an industry, a celebrity industry that is there hovering by the sides, covering all these stars and making money from them with or without their permission. So that's paparazzi, that's editors and journalists, that's T-shirt designers and bloggersl anyone who is running a business or making money off someone else's stardom.
So you need those five boxes to be ticked to be a celebrity in my book, I think. And if you don't tick those boxes, you're not a celebrity. So I'm pretty ruthless.
HZ: Hank Green, the author, podcaster, videomaker and educator, has his own way of framing celebrity:
HANK GREEN: There are two qualities that we think are one thing, and one is the number of people who know who you are. And the other is the sort of level of devotion or attention or excitement they have about you. And those things can be completely separated from each other, where a cult leader, has a very small number of people, but a very high level of enthusiasm. Whereas like David Schwimmer has a very high level of people, but a very low level of enthusiasm.
HZ: Ouch.
HANK GREEN: I'm sure there are like some sort of a high quality Schwimfans out there. But that's the first person that came to mind.
HZ: I was thinking of, like, I don’t know, the health secretary or something.
HANK GREEN: Ah yes. Well, I couldn’t tell you who that is either.
HZ: I was trying to summon the name and I was incapable, which I guess demonstrates your point actually.
LINDSEY WEBER: It's not always name recognition. People know the names of people who they care about.
HZ: Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger host the podcast Who? Weekly, which broadly classifies a celebrity as a Who or a Them.
LINDSEY WEBER: If you listen to a podcast, our podcast, you think we're Thems to you or whatever. But that's not it fully. And so there's lots of different categories that kind of make up these designations. And you can't fall in the trap of just knowing who someone is and being like, well then they're a Who, they're a Them or whatever.
HZ: So there are no absolutes?
LINDSEY WEBER: No, not even in our two category system. A Who and Them is a very simplified way of categorising a celebrity.
BOBBY FINGER: It's the person on the magazine that makes you say "Who?" and the person on the magazine that makes you say "Ah, Them."
LINDSEY WEBER: Yeah. That’s exactly it. And it's kind of just like your own personal categorisation of celebrities based on the knowledge that you have. The more and more that we study Whos and Thems, the more specific it gets. But what we're trying to do is to simplify, to oversimplify the way that we talk about celebrities.
HZ: That is difficult though, because your Who might be someone else’s Them, another country’s Them, a Them in a specific field, a Them on a specific platform, a generational Them…
BOBBY FINGER: In a way, such a strict binary and exclusive binary can be limiting. But then when you talk to people who are in very specific communities - like, oh, this person's a gay Them, this is a sports Them - when you open it up to the different communities and how passionate all the individual communities can get about the Who/Them the status of X celebrity, it just makes it more fun to talk about. Even though it's limiting, because it's limiting, people get really passionate about it, and they get really decisive, and it's a more fun conversation because it's just two. The moment you open it up to more categories, it's like that's not fun anymore.
LINDSEY WEBER: The longer we do this, the more the Who/Them thing breaks down. But that's almost kind of the beauty of it all, because it's something that is so almost strict, and yet we've learnt by doing this for however so many episodes that there's so much nuance to it and there's so much based on like how you grew up, where you grew up, what you were exposed to, whatever. But I think what's great about talking about Who/Them is, then you get the people saying, "In my family, this person is a Them." And that is the conversations that we are dying to have by ultimately reducing the celebrities to these categories.
BOBBY FINGER: The Who/Them terminology is so specific to the day that you use the Who/Them terminology. Our show is only accurate on its date. When we say so and so is a Who or Them, we mean it on the day of recording and maybe only then. And while it's true that some people will be Whos or Thems for months, if not years, if not decades, we can only speak to that on the day we record, because all these things are so fleeting and they're ever changing.
LINDSEY WEBER: And then you can talk about what happens when somebody goes from Who to Them or Them to Who and what that means and it and what you have to do to achieve that switch.
HZ: How do you go from being a Them to being a Who?
BOBBY FINGER: Time.
LINDSEY WEBER: Time. And just the generation that once cared about you has moved on. Maybe they stopped caring about celebrity culture in general, we find; or the TV show that you once were on has been cancelled and off the air for a long amount of time. Sometimes Thems become Whos because the character that was so iconic that they played has no longer has the influence that it once did. That's the difference. But for some people, some names will always be Thems. And that's the thing that we kind of always run into when we're saying like, oh, this person's irrelevant because 90210 has been off the air for ten years. But to someone, that is their childhood crush, and they will always remember who Brian Austin Green is. That's what I'm talking about.
BOBBY FINGER: But it's like when the audience for 90210 was no longer the dominant voice in culture, then those people started slipping. And I don't think it's instant. But right now, Brian Austin Green is a Who. Brian Austin Green was a Them in 1994. It's generational. It's time. But in that way, certain people can sustain their Themdom, if they're continually in movies and in TV shows or in the tabloids. Angelina Jolie barely acts, but she remains a Them because people won't stop talking about her.
HZ: There’s still a tabloid economy based on talking about her, so Angelina Jolie ticks that one of the celebrity criteria Greg Jenner listed earlier, in fact she fulfils all five. But Angelina Jolie is a celebrity, AND she’s famous. What’s the distinction? Greg?
GREG JENNER: So fame is like celebrity without the capitalism. It predates celebrity. Celebrity, for me, is an economic capitalistic system that kicks in in the 1700s. And the two are very closely linked, but they're not the same thing.
HANK GREEN: Fame is is entirely in someone else's eyes. So like the famous person does not get to define it. It is entirely in the eye of the beholder, in a way that nothing else is; like we say that like beauty is in the eye of the one doing the beholding. But that is to some extent not true. There is some objective qualities of beauty. But fame really is in every single person's mind except the person who is famous. Like, I can't judge my own fame because I don't know what you know, when you look at me, I don't know if someone's looking at me, if they're staring at me because I went to high school with them, because they know me from the coffee shop, because they've been watching my YouTube videos for ten years or because they think I'm cute, like, I have no idea which of those things it is or just to stare.
HZ: Or you've got ketchup on your face.
HANK GREEN: Exactly.
GREG JENNER: So if we look back at classical sources, where do we get fame from? What does it mean? What's the origin point? The Greeks had a goddess called Pheme (Φήμη), and she is a winged, beautiful goddess, with a trumpet. She parps a trumpet. And that is your name being sung into the heavens through the trumpet. So it's a nice thing. It's good. You get fame and it means people going to hear about you. But when you get to the Romans, and we get one of the most famous Roman writers, Virgil, in his Aeneid, he talks about Fama, where we get our word 'fame' from. That derives from the verb 'fari', meaning to speak or gossip about someone. And Virgil's Fama is not a beautiful goddess with wings and a parping trumpet; she's basically Godzilla. She's a terrifying, massive monster who stalks the land and she's covered with eyes and ears and tongues, and she grows in scale the more people that are gossiping about you. So the more you're being chatted about or gossiped about, the larger this monster becomes until she's vanishing into the clouds and she never sleeps. And she hunts you down. And Virgil's version of fame is predatory. It's terrifying. It's this enormous force of nature that comes for you, and there's nothing you can do about it.
HZ: Do you think this was a tactic to keep people subdued? So that they're submissive?
GREG JENNER: Ancient fame could be both glorious and positive or negative and pernicious and out of your hands. It could come for you like a wolf in the night almost. Fama, as the goddess from where we get the word fame, gives us a really interesting insight into the fact that celebrity is based on fame in some ways. And celebrity also has this conflicted, Janus-faced, positive and negative side to it. You've kind of got a really weird tension at the heart of fame and celebrity, in that fame could be negative and positive.
HZ: The positives: adulation, money, free stuff. The negatives: Godzilla creature. And... bad fame.
GREG JENNER: They also had words like kleos, the Greek word κλέος, meaning kind of glory. But weirdly, glory that could also be negative. So you could have bad kleos, you could have bad fame. And we might therefore kind of say, “Oh, you mean infamy." And unfortunately, no, I don't mean infamy, because the Romans didn't have the word infamy as we use it now. They had infamia, but their version of infamia was a sociological category for someone outside of the protection of the law, or someone low status. So a gladiator or a criminal had infamia, which means essentially that they were undignified. But it wasn't a status of gossip, it wasn't bad fame. It was a legal system, essentially.
HZ: ‘Infamia’ in ancient Rome meant a loss of status and rights: no more voting or taking public office; perhaps being exiled also. The accompanying reputational damage was a sort of bad fame. The word ‘infamy’ took a while to arrive in English, in the early 1400s.
GREG JENNER: And 100 years later on, you get the word 'notoriety' coming in to mean a negative thing. But up to that point, notoriety was a positive thing, or a neutral thing. It comes from the Latin 'notus' meaning of note, someone of note, which could be a good thing or a bad thing. And it's in 1549, I think, we get the book of Common Prayer in England. King Edward VI, who is the son of Henry VIII, issues a Protestant Book of Common Prayer. And there's a line in there saying "such persons as were notorious sinners." And the word 'notorious' there is not meant to be negative. It's a neutral word. Notorious sinners in the same way that notable sinners. But the fact that ‘sinners’ comes after it then has a huge influence.
HZ: That’s loaded.
GREG JENNER: Because this is the Book of Common Prayer, because so many people are reading it, it's such an influential text, ‘notorious’ then starts to be picked up as inherently negative. But it's not meant to be negative up to that point.
HANK GREEN: Can you be both famous and infamous? I feel like yes.
HZ: I think so, but I wonder whether you have to be one and then the other.
HANK GREEN: Like the infamy is what leads to the fame?
HZ: Yeah. Like, if you were a famous person who then murdered someone, would you be both?
HANK GREEN: Kind of no. Oh, interesting. So O.J. Simpson isn't really infamous because he wasn't originally famous for being bad. He just turned out bad.
HZ: Yeah, it's complicated, isn't it? Can you be both famous and infamous? I suppose you might have a politician - like Nixon.
HANK GREEN: But then, I think at this point, Nixon is infamous.
HZ: Hmm. Maybe you can't be both.
HANK GREEN: Well, he's famous too. Takes up takes up space in our brains. We gossip about him.
HZ: Meanwhile, attempting to achieve fame via infamy: Greg Jenner offers a warning from history.
GREG JENNER: Herostratus is the most famous case study here. He's a bad boy. He's very naughty. So he is someone who burns down one of the seven wonders of the world, the Temple of Ephasus. And he does so because he wants to be famous, but he has no talent. “I guess I'll destroy something that people like, and then people will know who I am.” So he burns down this temple; everyone is outraged, of course they are; and they capture him and they torture him and they try and find out why. “Why? Why would you do this, Herostratus?” And he was like, “I want to be famous.”
HZ: Kind of ahead of his time.
GREG JENNER: Well, that's the interesting thing, actually, there's now a thing called Herostratus Syndrome. Herotratus Syndrome is sometimes used by psychologists. I think it's sometimes used in terrorism studies to talk about the dangerous potential of what happens when rolling news gets excited about school shootings or horrific events that go out on TV and they start putting up all the manifestos that the shooter has written and they start putting up photos of the shooter. And for those people who will commit these horrible crimes, they can sometimes get a thrill out of this. Sometimes that's that motivating thing that inspires them to do a crime or give some pleasure to know that they are being talked about. And this is called Herostratus Syndrome, named after Herostratus, who 2500 years ago burned down a beautiful thing so that he could be famous. And his punishment was to be made ακλέος, so to have his kleos scrubbed away. He was to be removed from the annals of history. And this is an idea that we get from the Romans as well with the 'damnatio memoriae', which is the idea that you will be struck from the history books; all your sculptures will be smashed down; all evidence that you ever existed will be removed. Akleos is a punishment to remove someone's fame, to take away their reputation. But of course, Herostratus, we know his name, so it didn't work. His crime was so horrific that even though the punishment was that he would be deliberately forgotten from history, clearly, people were so outraged that they still had to write his name down. They still had to say, "This guy Herotratus burned down the temple." And so his name has carried on the winds of history, you know, the bastard's got a Wikipedia page; he wins.
HZ: That’s historian, writer and broadcaster Greg Jenner. You can hear him on the podcast You’re Dead To Me, and you can read his new book Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from Bronze Age to Silver Screen.
You also heard from Lindsey Weber and Bobby Finger, of the podcast Who? Weekly; and from Hank Green, maker of podcasts, videos, books, so many things - his new novel A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor is out now.
And coming up in today’s Minillusionist, Greg explains why famous people are called stars. Why would we compliment someone by comparing them to a huge ball of plasma very far away?
MINILLUSIONIST
HZ: I was just thinking about why celebrities are called stars. And I can think of various simple reasons why. But I wonder whether partly it's also just the gods are associated with the heavens, and that's a good bit of marketing.
GREG JENNER: Yeah, well it is. The stardom thing's really fascinating: the word star, it tended to be usually described as a something that the film industry had invented. But it actually it isn't. It goes back to the world of theatre 200 years ago really, in the Romantic period. And so stardom is linked to the heavens, you're right, I guess there is a certain religious element there. But actually, it was more to do with the fact that the early 1800s, there is the rise in meteorological science. And there are two really prominent comets, I think, in the early 1800s that are written about a lot in the newspapers and I think there is one in 1811, one in 1819. And the idea of someone being a kind of eternal being, of being better, greater, more powerful, almost celestial in their power - that's a slightly older idea, actually. Geoffrey Chaucer in the 1380s and so on talked about - he used this beautiful word, ‘stellified’, someone turned into a star, which I think is wonderful. And that itself is actually a much older idea because it goes way back to Ovid and his Metamorphoses and talking about Julius Caesar being turned into a bright star, because Caesar had been murdered, and soon after there had been a comet in the sky, and they had named that comet after Julius Caesar. So Julius Caesar got his own star. So Ovid then said, “All right, I'll put it in the poetry.” And then along comes Geoffrey Chaucer centuries later, and he's like, “yep, stellified, a human turned into a star.” And then by the 1800s, you then get people saying, “well, look, we've looked at the heavens and we can understand the weather actually and we know what's going on with comets. And that's all very exciting. And these these things are beautiful and eternal and gorgeous and rare and precious and we think that they are a bit like the superstars on the stage.” So you get people like Edmund Kean, Lord Byron, who are stars, and there aren't many of them. A star is incredibly rare, incredibly difficult, to achieve that status.
HZ: Even though there's loads of them in the sky.
GREG JENNER: That's the joke, isn't it? Because actually there are billions of stars in the sky, but in the romantic period, a star is incredibly rare. So Byron is described as a portent, I think it is. I think it's his girlfriend describes him as a human portent.
HZ: ‘Portent’ doesn't seem like a compliment.
GREG JENNER: Well, Lord Byron was a bit of a douche, sooo… He was sexy and thrilling. But he was also probably gonna say some controversial stuff, and, you know, he's going to break your heart. So, yeah, I think portent is probably quite good. I think it hits the nail on the head.
HZ: Someone who’s a bit of a douche but that compelling probably has charisma, a medieval english word meaning a divine gift, from the Charises in Greek mythology, goddesses of charm and creativity amongst other virtues, popularly depicted as the three Graces. Now, charisma is another one of those words that is hard to define, but we know it when we see it.
GREG JENNER: There have been various attempts to try and put that into other words. The X factor: the phrase ‘the X factor’ comes from this article written in, I think it was 1933, if I remember rightly; but it was written by a film journalist called Hilary Lynn. And they said, “Well, look, we can't really explain why fans go absolutely apeshit excited when a celebrity turns up, and we don't know why this is, but clearly, it's happening. There's something powerful about them. We don't know what it is. We'll have to call it X because it's an unknown algebraic equation.” ‘X factor’ comes from that article because it's someone going "Something weird is happening. We don't know what it is, and we don't think it's God. We don't think it's charisma, because maybe, you know, we're a secular society now. But there's something strange happening. We'll have to call it X." There are lots of attempts throughout the ages to explain why is this happening? Why are people screaming? And the other one is ‘oomph’, which is a lovely word. It's just fun to say. And it's a sort of onomatopoeic grunt. And you kind of get oomph 1930s. And these days it is the kind of thing a car journalist says about, you know, some new sports car: it's got real oomph. In 1939 Ann Sheridan was was voted Hollywood's most oomphish girl.
HZ: What a compliment.
GREG JENNER: Isn't it! And it’s such a lovely word. Oomphish. And Marilyn Monroe, in 1941, before she was Marilyn Monroe, she was still Norma Jean, but she was voted the oomphish of her high school classmates. So oomph is a bit more gendered, I think. I think it is probably more associated with women. But ‘X Factor’, ‘oomph’, ‘charisma’, ‘sparkle’... There's an awful lot of language associated with the problematic vagueness of why are some people more attractive than others?
HZ: It's funny: these terms - it, X factor, X, oomph, je ne sais quois: They show that we're not good at putting this quality into words at all.
GREG JENNER: No.
Your randomly selected word from the dictionary today is…
skimmington, noun, historical: a procession intended to ridicule and make an example of a nagging wife or an unfaithful husband.
^The two genders.
Origin C17: perhaps from ‘skimming-ladle’, used as a thrashing instrument during the procession.
‘Skimmington’! Try using it in an email today.
This episode was produced by me, Helen Zaltzman; the music is by Martin Austwick of palebirdmusic.com. Need some composing done for your podcast? Hire him!
You can find me @allusionistshow on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram - got some updates about the show on the way, so follow to keep fully informed. And for every episode of the Allusionist, and additional information about each topic, and transcripts, and the full dictionary entries for the randomly selected words of the day, visit the show’s forever home theallusionist.org.
