Nuovovecchio

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. This is Heath Blue calling from Palmer, Massachusetts.

How are you guys doing?

Doing well. How are you doing, Heath?

I’m doing wonderful, thank you.

Recently, I had somebody send me a link on Facebook, and it was Stephen Colbert performing Blister in the Sun with the Violent Femmes.

And now I’m a product of the 80s and the 90s.

I’m 40 years old, so I was left with this feeling of nostalgia for the violent themes, but also this feeling of love that I have for Stephen Colbert.

And I was wondering if there’s any kind of word that describes those two feelings together, because I’ve experienced it several times, and it’s not one or the other distinctly by themselves.

It’s a feeling all its own.

Do you know what I mean?

Yeah.

So nostalgia plus what?

Plus a feeling of something new that you love,

Like when an artist takes something old

And puts their own twist on it,

And you love the old thing that they put the twist on,

But you also love the new artists.

And, Heath, you said you’d experienced this several times.

Do you have other examples?

I mean, besides Stephen Colbert?

Like a Monet painting that gets redone by a digital artist.

This is a tough one.

I’ve never heard of a word like that that I can think of.

I’m thinking of all my Greek and Latin roots.

Juvenal.

Yeah, I was thinking of the Italian nuovo vecchio, maybe, because that sounds fancy, right?

I like that very much.

New old together, nuovo vecchio, sounds classy.

It sure does.

It’s kind of fake elegance.

I like that very much.

Well, it sounds a lot better than the one thing I came up with, which was nostalgia.

Oh, yeah.

That’s okay.

That’s pretty good.

Nostalgia.

I like that.

I do like that.

There’s also notions of a retro feeling here.

So you might do retro-stalgia.

There’s a short list somewhere, I don’t remember where I saw it, of words coined from the stalgia root, the false root of nostalgia.

Yeah, yeah.

The alga in nostalgia is pain, like an analgesic is something that takes away pain.

People take nostalgia and put all kinds of prefixes on it because they don’t really understand the word.

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

I like nostalgia, actually.

That’s the best we can do.

You know, I wouldn’t be surprised if other listeners come up with their own words for that feeling of nostalgia mixed with the enjoyment of something new.

Exactly.

Thank you, guys.

I appreciate your help.

Thank you for your call.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Do you have a better word for Heath?

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