Xcore

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The Macquarie (Australian) Dictionary folks have narrowed down their 2020 Word Of The Year search to a short list of 15 candidates: adaptive clothing, bee vectoring, cottagecore, doomscrolling, HIA, inclusion rider, Karen, lo-fi, panda bashing, profit-for-purpose, pyrocumulonimbus, seened, sky puppy, stalkerware, suicide first aid. Some of these are also candidates for WOTY lists in the U.S., e.g. doomscrolling and Karen, while others are more Down-Under-specific. One international example that is both topically and lexicographically interesting is cottagecore, defined as "a lifestyle characterised as being rustic or old-fashioned, involving such pastimes as handcrafting, baking, gardening, etc."

This coinage exemplifies a broader development of Xcore to mean "a socio-cultural movement associated with X" .

Xcore's journey obviously starts with X="hard". According to the OED, "hard core" as a noun meaning "Broken bricks, rubble, or similar solid material used as a filling or foundation" goes back to the 19th century:

1842 Times 14 May 2/2 (advt.) Contract for Gravel, Hard Core or Pickings, and Chalk.
1880 Macmillan's Mag. 41 252 Rough bits of all kinds of material, which goes by the name of ‘Hard Core’.
1920 F. Wood Mod. Road Constr. (ed. 2) 257 Hardcore is to be spread over the carriageway to a depth of 12 inches when consolidated by rolling.
1959 Princ. Forced Circulation in Hot Water Heating Syst. (1960) 39 Floors in contact with earth, hardcore etc.
2010 T. Bryan Constr. Technol. (ed. 2) 200 The ground-support slab..will be laid on a layer of compacted fill or hardcore.

A metaphoric shift to "A central or fundamental element which cannot be removed or reduced; an intractable person, group, or thing" or "The most active, committed, or doctrinaire members of a group or movement" took place in the 20th century:

1916 Burlington Mag. Apr. 39/1 However good socialists we may be, we all have, I believe, a hard core of anarchism within us which claims the gratifications of the individual spirit as one of the supreme goods of life.
1936 Nature 12 Sept. 441/2 Possibly 200,000 would be practically unemployable on any ordinary basis—the ‘hard core’ as it is called.
1968 Times 2 Sept. 2/7 Heathrow airport..could, perhaps, be called the hard core of Britain's noise problem.
2011 Independent 15 Dec. 2/2 The criminality and anti-social behaviour committed by a hard core of problem families.

1922 Fortn. Rev. 1 Apr. 575 The Die-Hards..are the hard core of the Unionist Party, the remnant of the old Conservatives, the rump of the still older Tories.
1955 Treatm. Brit. P.O.W.'s in Korea (H.M.S.O.) 25 This camp..was the home of the hard core of Other Rank reactionaries—men who had distinguished themselves by their heroic resistance to all Chinese brutality.
1990 Rolling Stone 5 Apr. 51/2 He liked Jane's Addiction, metal music and jazz, too..and was never a member of the Deadhead hard core.
2012 Church Times 21 Dec. 36/2 I have a moment's sober realisation that our hard core is getting smaller, death having undone two of my most faithful eight o'clockers in the past year.

The earliest adjectival citations are from 1951, in the senses "Designating an extreme or pronounced example of something; uncompromising; persistent, entrenched", or "Esp. of a supporter: highly committed or dedicated":

1951 J. Cornish Provincials 24 The party was acknowledged even by the hard-core cynics to be a credit to the Dunseith brothers.
1965 Harper's Feb. 69/2 We were scouting a hard-core Vietcong battalion.
1975 Citizen (Prince George, Brit. Columbia) 20 May 3 Most juvenile offenders would still be referred to the human resources department's community programs but a few hardcore cases will remain under the jurisdiction of his department even after sentencing.
2007 J. Ferris And then we came to End i. iii. 101 Marcia spoke with a hardcore South Side accent and wore the accompanying tall hair with bangs.

1951 Planning 26 Feb. 178 A team's victories or defeats..have a psychological effect on the ‘hard core’ supporters which is reflected in their standard of work during the week.
1970 Compar. Politics Jan. 252 The FRAP finds its hardcore supporters among certain sectors of the Chilean proletariat such as the traditionally radical miners.
1996 Entertainm. Weekly 10 May 39/3 Hardcore fans of the low-rated weepfest Sisters will not be disappointed by its finale.
2014 E. Adams Fund. Game Design 97 The hardcore gamer actively seeks gaming-related information through the Internet.

And then a little later we get the sense "Designating pornography of a very explicit kind":

1957 J. L. Rankin et al. Brief for U.S. filed in U.S. Supreme Court, Samuel Roth v. U.S. 17 Apr. 7 Over 90 percent of such convictions under the statute are for the mailing of material which is ‘hard-core’ pornography—commercially produced booklets and photographs dealing with every form of sexual perversion and activity known.
1975 P. Kronhausen & E. Kronhausen Sex People vii. 74 The obligatory ‘cum shots’ in hard-core porn movies.
2007 Time Out N.Y. 18 Jan. 86/2 This recurring standup and variety show also features..the ‘porno corner’ in which Hawley analyzes hardcore scenes.

And also "Designating a particularly uncompromising, extreme, aggressive, or experimental version of any of various types of popular music (originally jazz)":

1957 High Fidelity Apr. 91/2 There is more hard-core jazz in his playing than comes from the slightly spiked cocktail style of Stan Seltzer.
1977 Guardian 10 Jan. 8/5 The hard-core punk heroes are the Pistols, Clash and The Damned.
1995 Village Voice (N.Y.) 13 June 68/3 By the Time I get to Colorado is..a veritable codex of appropriated signs and signifiers: guns from hardcore rap; fire and bat-winged angels from heavy metal; the anarchy symbols from punk.
2010 Independent on Sunday 29 Aug. 45/4 ‘Alternative’ communities almost invariably involve copious smoking of hash, scuzzy dreadlocks, hardcore techno, dogs on string and the inescapable feel of urban decay.

As a noun, the noun "soft core" seems to have started as a sort of conceptual opposite to "hard core" in the rubble category: "Domestic or municipal refuse of a loose, granular consistency; street sweepings, rubbish, or filth", and the adjective form started in the 1960s as a conceptual opposite in the pornography category.

But the kind of cores we're tracking derive from the hardcore musical sense. In the 1990s came what Wikipedia describes as

Hardcore (also known as hardcore techno) is a subgenre of electronic dance music that originated in the Netherlands and Germany in the 1990s. It is distinguished by faster tempos (160 to 200 BPM or more), the intensity of the kicks and the synthesized bass (in some subgenres), the rhythm and the atmosphere of the themes (sometimes violent), the usage of saturation and experimentation close to that of industrial dance music. It would spawn subgenres such as gabber.

I'm not sure what the cultural and historical ordering is, but alphabetically, Wikipedia's List of Popular Music Genres gives us Breakcore, Crunckcore, Darkcore, Deathcore, Electronicore, Frenchcore, Grindcore, Horrorcore, Mathcore, Metalcore, Mombahcore, Nerdcore, Nintendocore, Queercore, Raggacore, Sadcore, Slowcore, Speechcore, and Thrashcore. Plus there are lots of genres that didn't make Wikipedia's list yet, like Countrycore, Emocore, Folkcore, and Loungecore.

I have the impression that these various Xcores originally carried an implication of peripherality and extreme dedication, and that this implication has gradually weakened, as such connotations often do.

Outside of musical genres, there's  Mumblecore, "a subgenre of independent film characterized by naturalistic acting and dialogue (sometimes improvised), low-budget film production, an emphasis on dialogue over plot, and a focus on the personal relationships of people in their 20s and 30s".

So "cottagecore" is an easy extension — and its Wikipedia entry lists several other "nostalgic aesthetic movements" using the same derivational compounding:

Cottagecore is an Internet aesthetic, also described by some sources as a Generation Z subculture, that celebrates an idealised rural life and developed throughout the 2010s until being named on tumblr in 2018. It values traditional skills and crafts such as foraging, baking, and pottery, and is related to similar nostalgic aesthetic movements such as grandmacore, farmcore, goblincore, and faeriecore. The ideas of cottagecore can help to satisfy for its proponents a desire for "an aspirational form of nostalgia" as well as an escape from many forms of stress and trauma. The New York Times described it as a reaction to hustle culture and the advent of personal branding.

Based on the advent of mindCORE — "Penn's hub for the integrative study of the mind" —  can we expect Xcore to gain the general sense of "an institution devoted to the study of X"? I haven't seen any other examples, but who knows.

 



23 Comments

  1. BillR said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 3:23 pm

    So I have to ask, is there a corecore?

    [(myl) — though I didn't know for sure before looking it up. It's "the hardest musical form of all cores".]

  2. Bob Ladd said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 3:29 pm

    The punctuation seems to reflect the gradual loss of the original metaphor. Most of the citations write hard core until the 1970s, then start hyphenating or writing solid. There's probably a stress difference reflected here too – written as two words it was probably originally stressed weak-strong ("phrasal stress"), but as it became more of an idiom it probably shifted to strong-weak ("compound stress"), which would then have favoured hyphenated or one-word spellings.

  3. Philip Taylor said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 3:39 pm

    Google "ngram"s would seem to support that hypothesis, Bob.

  4. Rod Johnson said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 4:18 pm

    Just a historical note: In music, hardcore as a genre of punk rock predates hardcore techno by a decade. Black Flag played their first show in 1977, and the scene grew very fast from there, and was the one of dominant threads in "alternative" music throughout the 80s. That's the source from which most of the other -cores sprang, much as cyberpunk gave birth to steampunk, dieselpunk and all the other -punks.

  5. Rod Johnson said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 4:27 pm

    As for "peripherality and extreme dedication," there is nothing subculture cannot subvert. Consider two possibly fictitious subcultures/styles, normcore and (not a -core, but related), vaporwave (-wave is another popular combining form), both of which have connotations of extreme dullness and a kind of aesthetic apathy.

  6. Rod Johnson said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 4:36 pm

    Sorry to belabor this, but for a detailed treatment, see the Aesthetics Wiki, which is a fan-made wiki that covers a long list of "aesthetics," including -cores, -punks, -waves and others.

  7. Barbara Phillips Long said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 6:03 pm

    Although I was familiar with the words hardcore and softcore, the formulation that made me notice -core in word formation was normcore, which referred to a casual, unisex style of clothing. When I searched the term, I got more than half a dozen articles written in 2014, so perhaps it became common in fashion writing about that time.

  8. David Nash said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 8:10 pm

    And Bardcore https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bardcore, fostered by the pandemic.

  9. Brett said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 10:56 pm

    In physics, "hard core" still denotes an interparticle potential that becomes impenetrably repulsive at short separations. That made the book Hard Core Scattering something of a disappointment.

  10. Rick Rubenstein said,

    December 6, 2020 @ 10:58 pm

    Who cares about cottagecore? I'm totally stoked to embrace whatever the hell bee vectoring is!

    [(myl) It's "a form of crop pest control in which hived bees are used to transport an organic powdered pesticide to any flora they pollinate, the bees having to pass through the pesticide as they leave the hive, with the powder attaching to their fine body hairs."

    So the effectiveness of your embrace might depend on whether or not you're hived, and on the fineness of your body hairs.]

  11. BobW said,

    December 7, 2020 @ 2:02 am

    As to “anarchy symbols from punk.” One of them is a capital letter A inside a capital letter O.

    Oddly enough, this was the US Army shoulder patch for the Third Army in WWI, WWII, and the Gulf War. It is now the symbol for US Army Central, which is the Middle East and Central- and South Asia area.

    Who knew George Patton was an anarchist?

  12. cameron said,

    December 7, 2020 @ 12:48 pm

    The term "hardcore" as a name for a musical genre didn't originally apply to hardcore techno, but to hardcore punk, more commonly now known simply as hardcore. "Hardcore" as a variety of punk was well established in the early 80s. It's possible that the Vancouver band D.O.A. popularized the term with their album Hardcore '81, which came out the year that you'd guess from the title. The bands associated with the term "hardcore" in the early 80s were very diverse, including bands like Minor Threat, Black Flag, Bad Brains, and the aforementioned D.O.A., but also musically quite different bands such as Social Distortion, 45 Grave, and False Prophets. The term "hardcore" originally referred only to American bands. There were bands in England playing similar music, but they were generally referred to simply as punk, not as hardcore punk, or hardcore.

    In the late 80s there was a merging of musical styles between hardcore punk and extreme metal, a development referred to as "crossover thrash" which resulted in the term hardcore being applied specifically to the bands that embraced the new metal-flavored variety of music. Already by the early 90s younger kids who hadn't been part of the scene in the early 80s were insisting that bands like Black Flag and Circle Jerks weren't hardcore, even though they'd been the very definition of hardcore ten years earlier, because to younger fans hardcore referred specifically to the post-crossover metal-based sound.

    I think the first musical spin-off to use a variant of the x-core formula modeled on the term hardcore was emocore, in the late 80s. That was soon shortened to just emo.

  13. KevinM said,

    December 7, 2020 @ 3:47 pm

    @David Nash, thank you for "Bardcore," which turns out not to refer to songs like "Full Fathom Five" or "Under the Greenwood Tree." My wife keeps catching me laughing to myself every time I think of "Hildegard von Blingin'.

  14. Daniel Barkalow said,

    December 7, 2020 @ 6:36 pm

    Re "embracing bee vectoring":

    "We've going to administer your vaccine now. It may sting a little."

  15. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 7, 2020 @ 10:10 pm

    1. As has been already noted, the key progenitor here is "hardcore" in the "specific-subtype-of-punk-rock" sense, which arose (both the style and the label) rather abruptly around 1979-80. The bands referenced in the 1977 Guardian quote are earlier punk bands, and they may have been "hard-core" in the ordinary sense of that modifier, but they simply were not "hardcore" bands in the idiomatic sense that developed a few years later. Me and the small subset of my high school classmates who were listening to that stuff by '81-'82 would have mocked you had you been so clueless as to think otherwise. One of the key tells of the new idiomatic usage is that you could refer to SS Decontrol or TSOL or whoever idiomatically as being simply a "hardcore band" and not need to specify "hardcore punk band."

    2. Another morphologically productive suffix with a similar usage is -wave; originally just "New Wave," which was contemporaneous with yet somehow different from late '70's punk (with the exact dividing line being as difficult to discern as that between beer and ale in a famous example given by the punk guitarist Robert Quine's cousin Willard). E.g., chillwave, vaporwave, darkwave, and my personal favorite (as a label if not as a style) dolewave, which is apparently an Australian thing associated with the sort of young people that might be called "slackers" in Gen X AmEng. Probably more as well – I haven't done a control-F on that wikipedia list of subgenres. I also don't know if -wave has expanded outside strictly musical contexts the way -core and -punk have.

  16. Rodger C said,

    December 8, 2020 @ 10:32 am

    We could have a post on "Hildegard of Bingen" (the calendar of saints) vs. "Hildegard von Bingen" (music announcers who probably only know of her from Deutsche Grammophon albums). The latter, to me, makes no sense in English. Her name was Hildegard. She was from Bingen.

  17. Justin said,

    December 8, 2020 @ 1:16 pm

    @BillR It's been done in jest before. At the /tv/ film community, people would make "essential Xcore" images where X was a film genre or concept, and the image contained movie posters of films considered essential viewing within that genre. Here's the one for "essential core-core":
    https://i.imgur.com/34FjWPQ.png

  18. Jerry Friedman said,

    December 8, 2020 @ 2:20 pm

    Rodger C: That reminds of the listing for St. John of the Cross in the table of contents of John Frederick Nims's book Sappho to Valéry: Poems in Translation. St. John's name is given as San Juan de la Cruz.

  19. Terpomo said,

    December 8, 2020 @ 4:25 pm

    @David Nash, KevinM
    I was thinking of mentioning Bardcore; although its style is ostensibly medieval, instances with lyrics seem to be in English that's more Renaissance than medieval. However, the_miracle_aligner has done songs in various actual medieval languages like Anglo-Saxon and Old French, some better translated than others.

  20. Philip Taylor said,

    December 8, 2020 @ 5:25 pm

    My sincere thanks to the contributors here who have introduced me to the world of "bardcore". I had never even heard of it, let along heard it, but now that I have, I find I enjoy it. Thank you.

  21. Rodger C said,

    December 9, 2020 @ 10:49 am

    @Jerry Friedman: I once read a whole book (in English, by an Anglophone) that did that, along with "Felipe Segundo." It's an annoying Hispanist habit that an editor should have dealt with.

  22. J.W. Brewer said,

    December 9, 2020 @ 3:16 pm

    @Rodger: But non-specialist writers in English these days typically refer to the present King of Spain as Felipe rather than Philip, just as they refer to his predecessor as Juan Carlos rather than John Charles. Of course writing (if wanting to be more precise) "Felipe VI" helpfully sidesteps the need to choose between "the Sixth" and "Sexto." Religious foreigners are still more routinely Anglicized, i.e. Pope John Paul I rather than Giovanni Paolo. Indeed, one minimal pair might be the St. Basil who is the namesake of St. Basil's Cathedral in the Kremlin and the Grand Prince Vasili (or Vasilii or Vasily) III, father and predecessor of Ivan the Terrible. They both lived in Moscow at the same time (the saint being about ten years older than the monarch) and were both named Василий in their own language, yet are these days often/usually (although certainly not invariably) treated differently in English-language writing.

    Hildegard is just a striking example because she is her own minimal pair because she apparently varies between being a saintly foreigner and a secular foreigner depending on context. Also striking because there's nothing to anglicize or decline-to-anglicize except for the preposition since there isn't an anglicized variant or cognate of either "Hildegard" or "Bingen."

  23. Michael said,

    December 10, 2020 @ 6:48 pm

    @JW Brewer:
    Of course, "New Wave" in non-musical contexts predates punk and the 1970s by quite a bit. The "nouvelle vague" or "French New Wave" in cinema began in the late 1950s, and Science Fiction literature had its "New Wave" in the 1960s. The music scene was late in adapting the term.

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