American album reviews

[d6jg]

I'm British and therefore like to think I have a good command of the Queens' English, both spoken and written.
Why is that contemporary US album reviews of albums recorded 40 or 50 years ago insist on using terminology such as "sophomore project" in place of the better shorter phrase -"second album"?
It's a fad. My goat gets it does.

[RonM]

Probably for the same reason that those who use "sophomore project" might be considered by Brits to be a bit of an "anorak".

R.

[d6jg]

Probably for the same reason that those who use "sophomore project" might be considered by Brits to be a bit of an "anorak".

R.

What do you North Americans' consider them to be? Just asking.

[garym]

What do you North Americans' consider them to be? Just asking.

I'm a North American, but have never called anything the "sophomore" project or effort or whatever. For me, it's always been "the second album" or "the first album" etc. I've never referred to any album as "their eponymous" album either.....

[d6jg]

I'm a North American, but have never called anything the "sophomore" project or effort or whatever. For me, it's always been "the second album" or "the first album" etc. I've never referred to any album as "their eponymous" album either.....

Good man! :-)

[garym]

Good man! :-)

However, I can be quite pedantic with my friends. When they mention someone's first album, I'm quick to point out, that "no, that's not his/her first album....they released an earlier album 5 years before..." (often comes up when referring to Boz Scaggs or Warren Zevon's so-called "first" albums.)

[Fahzz]

Probably for the same reason that those who use "sophomore project" might be considered by Brits to be a bit of an "anorak".

R.

And here I just thought it was a raincoat!

BRITISH informal derogatory:

a studious or obsessive person with unfashionable and largely solitary interests.

[RobbH]

What do you North Americans' consider them to be? Just asking.

I consider them (those who consistently use terms like "sophomore project") to be pretentious.

[rgro]

In our part of the US (west) we tend to use "sophomore" as an adjective to describe the "second" of something. As in his sophomore season of playing professional soccer, baseball, football, etc. But, it's not restricted to athletics or academia (sophomore year of high school or university) and could be just as easily used to describe a second album, movie, or book. The term has no pejorative meaning for us when used in those contexts.

[RobbH]

There's a really annoying thing about language: it's constantly changing. And another annoying thing is that it changes in different ways in different places. So while I think of a particular expression as a turn of phrase that might have been clever the first time it was used but has since become overused and trite, that same way of saying something may have become the standard elsewhere.

Mea culpa. Saying that someone who uses a certain phrase is pretentious (as I just did, a few messages back) is a very pretentious thing to do.