Actually, I believe they prefer to be called "daytime dramas." But if you're in line at the supermarket, and want to catch up with the plot convolutions of All My Children, you don't pick up the "Daily Drama Digest," you plop down $3.75 USD for the "Soap Opera Digest." The industry is clearly a little schizophrenic about nomenclature.

The parallels should already be forming.

The term "soap opera" dates back to the corporate sponsorship of radio shows. Long before the short-lived Dana Carvey Show, which intended to have the name of a different sponsor in the title of each episode, radio shows blatantly stuck the name of the product and manufacturer into any available moment. The Shadow and Sherlock Holmes were shills for tobacco and foot powder, swearing by the crime-fighting aptitude of each, much in the way that Hostess Twinkies and Rubic's Magic Snakes were able to defeat a host of colorful Marvel and DC villains.

"Soap opera" came about, I am told, because different soap manufacturers sponsored competing serialized melodramas, targeted specifically at the romance-starved American housewife. The phrase just sort of... happened.

Well, that's the "soap" half, what about "opera"? Opera is a type of musical theatre, but it is a very specific type of musical theatre that must meet a set of criteria to actually be "opera" and not just a bunch of people singing a libretto. Popular misconception has it that an opera contains no spoken words, or sung lyrics, but according to the Oxford English Dictionary, opera must merely have music be an "essential part" of the whole, which must have orchestral accompaniment and scenery. One cannot therefore have an opera of Waiting for Godot, for -- all the music stuff aside -- one bare tree on a stage does not scenery make.

Star Trek was dubbed "space opera," not because Kirk and Spock stood in front of lavish sets and, to paraphrase Edith Wharton, sung the German text of French plots in Italian for the clearer understanding of the English-speaking audience. "Space opera" is clearly an extension of "soap opera," but what connections and similarities does Star Trek share with radio plays of 1948 or current episodes of As The World Turns? Sure, Star Trek was episodic. And where was minor character development from week to week, the plots did not particularly build upon themselves or provide the viewer with a continuing saga. There was one story, and various permutations of it were explored every episode.

And while that last sentence may sound like the heart of a soap opera as well, it doesn't make K Trek a soap. "Space opera" is a misnomer, just as "soap opera" is. And additionally, both terms are diminutive in nature.

But the diminutiveness of names is oft overlooked, and industries can move past names that make them seem small and petty. No one uses the term "talkies" anymore to refer to films with sound and dialogue, and because of it's lack of use, "talkies" sounds strange and awkward. It would be unsurprising to hear one say that the term is indicative of a bygone era's predilection for cutesy populist nicknames. After all, this was the industry that knighted Clara Barton "The It Girl". But "movie" is also a term that is out of the same sort of popular baby-talk, a diminutive way of shortening and familiarizing the public with "moving pictures." "Moving Pictures" is arch; "movies" is intimate, the sort of love talk that goes on as two partners drift off to sleep together. Shorthand invites a closer familiarity. However, conventional wisdom claims that familiarity breeds contempt. You might have noticed that reviewers who want to elevate the status or level of respect they feel is due a moving picture will almost always refer to it as a "film" and not a "movie."

The creation of the term "daytime drama" came out of a reaction to try and justify the relevance, importance, and quality of soap opera. This was a running gag in Tootsie, which was filmed in 1983. As you can see, the issue hasn't curled up and died in the face of the New Nomenclature.

I recently participated in the discussion surrounding the renaming of a national non-profit organization. The program, established in San Francisco in 1978, adopted a name that was familiar to the region, having been previously used by another outreach program that gone the way of the non-profit. Upon going from a single program to a national force, it realized that it couldn't enforce its trademark, as it did not have founding rights on the name. Instead of trying to acquire the rights to the name, which seemed a murky prospect, they decided to rechristen the organization.

After listening to multiple brainstorm sessions where people put forward words that seemed to embody the ideals of the program and spirited adjectives that attempted to describe the atmosphere and character, we were left with a chalkboard with a double-handful of clunky phrases that strained to be hip and catchy. They sounded trite, and the newly-proposed names detracted from the innovations that the program professed to embody.

And once I realized that one of these lukewarm titles was bound to be adopted, I was compelled to point out the following:

Proper names don't need to mean anything. If a name is successful, the object to which the name refers completely eclipses any definition the word or phrase may have originally had. Reputation becomes connotation, and connotation supplants denotation. It was probably intentional that the Nike Corporation named itself after the Greek goddess of victory, however, it would not surprise me if ninety-eight percent of Nike's customers were completely ignorant of not only the words origins and meaning, but also the real way to say it. Nike's publicity snowjob has been so effective that it has created a new way to pronounce the word, let alone a new worldwide, cross-lingual meaning. The Ford Taurus was the most popular car in the United States for more than half a decade; if you say the word "taurus" in conversation, a person is more likely to think "car" than he is to think "astrology" or "male bovine."

It cannot be ignored that both of these examples involve millions of dollars spent upon advertizing and publicity to ensure that product recognition took place. So a simple non-commercial way to look at it is with a person's first name. Despite the fairly common knowledge that Peter means "rock," I greet my younger brother daily without translating his name in my head. The definition of the word is completely irrelevant, because the object that possesses the name is far more commonplace.

In the face of such evidence that the malleable nature of words allows for popular consciousness to completely obscure their true meanings, it becomes difficult to accept the common proposition that words have power.

So. "Comics." "Graphic literature." "Sequential art." "Issues." "Pamphlets." "Singles." "Zines." Whatever, it doesn't matter what these things that we read are called. Steven Grant disagrees with me, detailing a history of the medium in a manner far better than I ever could , so I won't bother to retread in his path. But every argument that I have encountered that either supports or criticizes any one of the above terms has done so on the basis of connotation and mental association: what does the word make you think of outside of what we would like it to refer to?

And that's my point. It doesn't matter which one we pick, as long as it is used in such a manner that the current usage overwrites any past associations or definitions. Pick one. Just one. And then stick with it, stop suggesting new terms and work to make the word or term reflect what we want it to mean. If we define the word by associating it with a product, if we create the mirror that reflects this meaning and product back to the populace, our definition will be the accepted one. But we can't do it based on the meanings that the word has previously contained. Those meanings will be grace notes in the Oxford English Dictionary, with the explanation that they are usages that are obsolete. But if we can't back just one horse, our reputation will be as schizophrenic and weak as that of the "Daytime" industry.

Benjamin Russell was the first person in the history of his primary school to receive a permanent, laminated library pass. This is probably part of the problem. He is also the columns editor for PopImage.

PopImage Forum - Discuss this message at the PopImage forum.