The fat of the self

A harsh, if also slightly humorous neologism in the Danish language is the term selvfed which literally designates people as being 'self-fat' or 'self-fattish'. There's a prehistory to this as 'fat' as an adjective in Danish can mean 'cool, fine, groovy'. So if we're 'self-fattish' we feel groovy while unfortunately we appear vainglorious, self-indulgent and all too full of ourselves.

I wonder where selvfed came from (?), but it is a slang term which has now been adopted on a broad scale and is often used to add some street credibility to a text. The effect is questionable though, and I'm glad to have deleted the word from a draft of my own this afternoon - on good advice from a street credible colleague.

Well, TV anchorman Jes Dorph-Petersen had his picture on the cover of a free newspaper (one of the still more free newspapers) the other day with a headline saying: "People call me self-fattish" - the story being that 'I'm really not, so I don't mind'.

And literary critic Leonora Christina Skov in Weekendavisen bluntly names writer Jens Chr. Grøndahl (cf. the ravioli in nut sauce affair) "King Self-Fattish himself" in a debate over what qualifies a man or a woman to be called "a Big White Man" (as yet another term of abuse). Actually this was a debate which came down to the question of being self-fattish or not.

The term seems to become useful when people are exposing their personal aesthetics without questioning its superiority (and this is basically what I ask of the texts that I have studied too). Exposing yourself in your work requires a strong sense of proportion which is bound to fail from time to time. And before you know it, you're a pretentious rascal.

No wonder that teachers of journalism tell their students to keep clear of the first person singular. Use can lead to abuse and to fatal self-fatness in no time.