Word of the week: Aesthetic(s)

The beautiful and the bad.

Last week

Mark Oppenheimer

tagged me in a post in which he bemoaned the use of aesthetic to describe certain phone cases. He called me a “language Substacker extraordinaire,” which of course got my attention, and he appealed to me to pass judgment, presumably in his favor.¹

As it happens, I’ve been interested in new meanings of aesthetic for quite a while! And I have Opinions about this word and about language peeves generally.

Here’s the story that pissed Mark off. He identified it as “a screenshot from the Wall Street Journal.” That got my attention, too, because it’s untrue.

“Impractical, aesthetic phone cases.” The page in question appears in the print edition of New York magazine; the online version is dated January 15, 2025.

The article appeared in New York magazine’s Strategist section and not in the Wall Street Journal, which has a totally different editorial aesthetic.

But let’s skip to the substance of Mark’s complaint, which zeroes in on “Impractical, Aesthetic Phone Cases”:

About 37.4 percent of you know exactly where I am going with this, which is that I am tearing my hair out . . . and screaming, That is not what that word means! There are a few battles I know that I am losing to the young’uns. One is that they pronounce “vs.” as in “Yankees vs. Red Sox,” as “verse” instead of “versus.” (If you are a millennial or Gen Z person who does this, can you write to me and tell me why? How do you not know the word “versus”? How has my generation failed you?) And another losing battle is preserving the old meaning of “aesthetic,” something like “relating to the beautiful” but not “beautiful” itself.

Here’s the thing, Mark (and anyone else who’s shaking their fist at Kids These Days): During its relatively short lifespan in English (early 18th-century to now), the noun and modifier aesthetic has undergone numerous shifts in meaning, and the one you’re kvetching about is just the latest in a series.² The aesthetic in “aesthetic phone cases” doesn’t mean “beautiful”; it means relating to an aesthetic. And “an aesthetic” can be as far from “beautiful” as you can imagine.

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English imported aesthetic from German Ästhetisch; its ultimate source is Greek aisthētikós: “of sense perception, sensitive, perceptive.” That’s meaning #1.

Beauty had nothing to do with it until around 1712, when aesthetic first appeared in print in plural form³: aesthetics, a branch of philosophy concerned with the nature of beauty and the nature of taste. (The German philosopher Immanuel Kant was instrumental in spreading this usage around.) That’s meaning #2.

Eventually aesthetics took on a more mundane sense of “beauty” or “a pleasing appearance” (Merriam-Webster’s example phrase is “appreciated the aesthetics of the gemstones”). That’s meaning #3.

Go, Team Aesthetics! Ball cap by San Francisco artist Lauren DiCioccio. See more of DiCioccio’s work here.

Around 1812, the singular form became an adjective meaning “relating to perception by the senses.” (Meaning #4.) In 1822 it began to appear as a noun with the sense of “artistic beauty or taste.” (Meaning #5.) And around 1833 the adjective began to be used to signify “in accordance with principles of artistic beauty or taste; giving or designed to give pleasure through beauty; of pleasing appearance” (source: OED). Meaning #6!

Three centuries is plenty of time to become accustomed to five meaning shifts. The latest meanings of aesthetic, though, may still be too new to be aesthetically pleasing to everyone, and they haven’t yet arrived in standard dictionaries.⁴

Take those “aesthetic phone cases.” It’s pretty clear from a glance that they don’t conform to “principles of artistic beauty or taste.” Aesthetic means something different here: not “appealingly attractive” but rather “befitting your personal aesthetic preference,” which might mean “gloomy” or “eye-popping” or “kawaii” or “zany.” (How else besides “zany” to describe a “realistic buttered-toast phone case, made from resin and molded from real bread”?) Or as New York’s Erin Schwartz puts it: “amassing a ton of beautiful, shiny, interesting ideas and throwing them together without streamlining away the weird or discordant bits.”

And this isn’t just Aesthetics According to Erin Schwartz. When I did a general search for “aesthetic phone cases” I encountered many, many hits. It’s a category on Etsy, on Amazon (where one example is labeled “for girls only”), and on a site called Gurl Cases, among many other vendors. Sometimes aesthetic means “designed by an artist.” Sometimes it means “looks like it might have been designed by an artist.” Sometimes it means “makes you look more artistic.”

And it’s not just phone cases that can be aesthetic now, although that’s a huge category. I also found aesthetic laptop wallpapers (“fresh and stylish”), aesthetic pens (“easy on the eyes”), and aesthetic stickers (“choose the book that matches your aesthetic the most”).⁵

And since I’ve brought it up, let’s talk about your aesthetic, which is what this new sense — #7? — is all about.

“And then she realized — the entire aesthetic she’d picked out for middle school was totally cringe.” According to Merriam-Webster, cringe has been used as an adjective since 1983. Meanings change! Cartoon by Emily Flake for the New Yorker, February 10, 2025.

Aesthetic is a highfalutin newish way of saying “style” in a way that’s both specific and global. In 2025, the suffix -core is often used as shorthand for this sense of aesthetic. The Aesthetics Wiki, which was created in 2018 and which contains hundreds of “aesthetics,” many of them -cores like Barbiecore and zombiecore, traces the new definition of aesthetic to “Millennials and Generation Z,” who use the term to describe “a collection of images, colors, objects, music, and writings that creates a specific emotion, purpose, and community.” (One -core that hasn’t yet made it into the wiki is hopelesscore, which

Adam Aleksic

discussed last week in his Etymology Nerd newsletter.) Your aesthetic is both intensely personal and deeply communal: a means of self-expression and a way of announcing your membership in a like-styled tribe.

Back in 2021, Vogue.com fashion news editor Sarah Spellings attempted to define this still-new sense of aesthetic for her readers:

Overtime [sic], “aesthetic” has evolved from an academic word and something utilized by artists and auteurs to something to categorize our own identities by. It can mean both personal style and a vague stand-in for beauty. Aimlessly scrolling on Pinterest a few months ago, I was prompted that I may also enjoy looking at “frat boy aesthetic.” How could that not pique my interest? Frat boy aesthetic turned out to be a scroll of red solo cups, beer pong, irreverent Americana, and, darkly, more than a few photos of people passed out with sharpie on their face.

To my pleased surprise, Spellings interviewed linguist Gretchen McCulloch, author of the indispensable Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language (2019), for the story:

“When you talk about someone having a personal brand or their brand is strong, you’re getting the metaphor from marketing and branding [McCulloch explained]. Whereas when you talk about someone having an aesthetic or that is or isn't ‘my aesthetic’ then you're getting your metaphor from the world of art.”

Who wouldn’t prefer an art metaphor to a marketing metaphor? Not I. Indeed, that may be the most beautiful way of thinking about aesthetic: as a metaphor, not as a subject with a fixed, literal meaning set in stone—or in Merriam-Webster.

And those “aesthetic phone cases”? Each one is a marker not of conventional or classical beauty but of a specific aesthetic: your aesthetic. Kitsch-core. Rainbow-core. Toast-core. The beauty is in the eye of the beholder; the aesthetic is in the tribal identity.

Bonus tracks:

I’ve been writing about the -core suffix for a long time:
Mumblecore (2007)
Normcore (2014). (I’m delighted that this blog post is the first footnote in Wikipedia’s normcore entry.)
Cottagecore (2020)
The -core corps (2022)

Aesthetic Roomcore (“Let’s Make Your Room Aesthetic!”)

1. He also wrote that the definition he dislikes — “pleasing in appearance” — has “jumped into the leave,” which is either an idiom I’m unfamiliar with or a typo. Help me out, Mark!

2. As for verse vs. versus, people have been stubbornly versing for at least 30 years. (See this 2012 Language Log post.)

3. The construction imitates other Greek-derived philosophy words: economics, hermeneutics, dialectics, politics.

4. One Urban Dictionary entry, from March 2021, defines aesthetic as “anything that looks good to a teenage girl.”

5. I’ll deal with aesthetic surgery and aesthetic dentistry some other day, or maybe never.