For every person who knows what quod vide means, there are probably 100 or more who would see q.v. in some material they are reading and know what it meant without even thinking about it.

It may be that q.v. is going away, like pari passu (on equal footing with) and tant pis [2], of which John Kenneth Galbraith was so fond. And then there are, of course, the Latin phrases that are so common it is hard to remember that they are Latin (https://www.inklyo.com/latin-phrases-you-use-every-day/). Or it may be that I am just reading more electronic and less print material. I thought about this this morning when I realized that hyperlinked references are the electronic (modern?) way to say q.v.

I can say I wrote a piece about intelligent four wheel drive q.v. (meaning “and you should go look at it”) or I can say that I wrote a piece on intelligent four wheel drive (https://thedilettantesdilemma.com/2018/05/09/all-wheel-drive/). [3] We see, in other words, that the underlined text, the one that makes your cursor turn into a hand with the index finger raised, [1] has the same function as q.v. and is a good deal more convenient.

But that brings me to my enthusiasm for Vox Sentences. Every day, I get a notice in my inbox that the Vox Sentences for that day is available. The stories in the one I am going to use as my illustration were written by Starvos Agorakis, about whom I know nothing except that he is often listed as the writer of a day’s collection of the news.

Vox Sentences offers three “stories” per installment. In this one, the three stories are: a) A cabinet shakeup, b) The second-largest ebola outbreak is still raging, c) miscellaneous, d) verbatim, and e) read more from Vox. I am skipping over “watch this,” a video about something. There are nine bullets under the headline about the cabinet shakeup, mostly from news sources like CNN or the Wall Street Journal. All of the references are hyperlinked. There are four bullets under the one about ebola, three under miscellaneous. Under “Read more from Vox” there are no bullets, only subheadlines, but each of them is a hypertext.

It is very easy to go deep using Vox Sentences, a fact that I will illustrate momentarily. Here, I want to say that I have not the appetite I once had for “scanning the news horizon” and what little I had left deserted me at the dawn of the Trump administration. On the other hand, there are things I continue to be interested in and going deeper into those is something my appetite still supports.

In the episode of Vox Sentences I referred to, the thing that caught my eye was in the very last section: read more from Vox. In that section, there was a headline “Brands once used elitism to market themselves. Now inclusion sells.” Clicking on this takes you to an article by Nadya Nittle, published in some corner of the Vox enterprise called “The Goods.”

Here is a sentence from Nittle’s article.

For years, Victoria’s Secret has been a brand based on exclusivity, but in an age when inclusion is widely championed, the lingerie maker has seen its sales slump.

Notice the hypertext. Clicking on that takes you to an article that Rebecca Jennings published, on her own blog, it appears, called “The Stubborn Irrelevance of the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”

And in that article, these paragraphs appear; each, you will note, with additional hypertext links.

Like many fashion brands’ runway shows, Victoria’s Secret has also has a rocky record on inclusion, though in recent years, it has appeared to change that — last year, nearly half the cast were women of color. Yet the show didn’t cast its first model of Asian descent until nearly a decade and a half into its existence, with the hiring of Liu Wen in 2009. And in 2012, both Victoria’s Secret and Karlie Kloss were forced to apologize when Kloss walked down the runway in “Native American-inspired” attire involving a feathered headdress; the ensemble was eventually edited out of the broadcast.

In 2017, perhaps recognizing its strategies were becoming less effective, Victoria’s Secret planned to hold the show in China for the first time (previous shows had been held in London, New York, Miami, LA, Cannes, and Paris) in an attempt to corner the Chinese lingerie market, which Euromonitor estimated would be worth $33 billion by 2020

There is no bottom to this well. All the hyperlinked articles have additional hyperlinks. But eventually, I found that I had gotten interested in the way the words “elite” and “inclusive” were being used. You can see examples by clicking on the Victoria’s Secret hyperlink.

The first thing to notice is that elite is a bad word—it is negatively connoted—while “inclusive” is a good word. I don’t think that works in any sensible way at all, so I think I am going to poke at it a little and see if it pokes back. And since we got here by Victoria’s Secret, let’s consider what elite and inclusive might mean to standards of beauty.

But…maybe next time.

[1] The possibility of using another finger on that hand just now occurred to me. Surely I am not the first one. I wonder who I would have to talk to to get my cursor/hand customized.
[2] “So much the worse.”

[3]  I should remember, at some point, to say that I know nothing at all about four wheel drive, intelligent or stupid.  I am using it as a metaphor for various motive forces and I know just enough to keep the metaphorical use on track.