Screwing with Vanity Fair

Vanity Fair (VF), the intellectually pompous, well-written, so-full-of-ads-they-have-to-put-the- letters-on-page-172 (or thereabouts) publication: yes, I’ll admit to reading it. I don’t always agree with the politics presented, but then I don’t always read those articles. Some of the true crime, and bios, book reviews, and so on are fantastic, but I don’t necessarily read every piece or always get the magazine, and that’s how this one thing started to bug me.

The first time I read the word “zeitgeist” in VF, I didn’t know what it meant, so being the dweeb that I can be, I looked it up.

zeitgeist: the spirit of the time; general trend of thought or feeling characteristic of a particular period of time.

Well, I thought, sort of a sissy-pants word to use, but it’s VF, so I moved on. The thing is that sometimes I saw this word several times in an issue and I wasn’t even reading the whole thing. Then I’d get a new issue and there was that word again. It started to really irritate me. What kind of group think, smug, pretentious people would continue to use this word like it’s a common noun in conversation? I started envisioning them walking around in little bowties and saying things like, “Is everyone eating Thai food for lunch? It’s the best thing there is. At least that’s the zeitgeist for Thursday.”

I’d be having a perfectly enjoyable read and there it was again, like someone jumping out from behind a door and yelling, “ZEITGEIST! You’re it!” I loathed it and I knew it was coming every time I read the DAMN MAGAZINE!! To calm my demons, I finally wrote a letter to VF asking them with sarcasm if they had ever printed an issue without the word or if it was their intellectual version of Where’s Waldo lurking somewhere in the pages. Was there a contest I didn’t know about, because if there was, I surely should be the winner. Of course, they didn’t publish the letter, but months later I was reading a section at the end of the letters called “More from the V.F. Mailbag” and the magazine spoke to me: “Has Vanity Fair ever published an issue that did not contain the word ‘Zeitgeist?’ Well, Gail Snyder of Woodstock, Georgia, this might have been the one—until you came along.”

I kid you not. I think they were a little cranky that I pointed this out, but I’d had my say at least. Maybe some of them didn’t even use the word in their snooty conversations for a day, I liked to imagine. That would have been the end of my strange little episode, but three months later, while reading the same section I was shocked to read this: “I cannot be the first to note that Ms. Snyder of Georgia chastises V.F. in the March Mailbag for overuse of the word ‘Zeitgeist’ and receives somewhat of a prickly response, yet her claim is validated later in the same issue (page 214, column three, paragraph two). What delicious delight for Ms. Snyder!”

Something tells me that this isn’t over; at least that’s the ZEITGEIST of my multiple personalities for this period of time today.