re: #162 wheat-dogghazi

Is ballroom salsa “real” salsa (or tango, or rhumba, etc.)? Not really, because those are party or club dances done only for fun, not for prizes and fun. There are no rules for party dancing (except for ones like, “don’t grab your partner’s butt if she happens to be the host’s wife, sister or daughter, ese”). There are rules for competitive dancing.

Yes, that is part of the root problem. Yet even in the highly stylized world of competitive dance there are acknowledgments about genres. What DWTS is doing these days, and this is true for other shows too, is not even acknowledging the genre but just using the “brand” or label and attaching anything to it.

It’s part of the process of stripping words of meaning or context.

Another example from last night’s show - Valerie Harper doing a “Viennese Waltz”. Now Harper is there to draw ratings and to be the elegant one in the sea of burlesque that swamps the show, and frankly to draw sympathy ratings (because she is dying of cancer.) Anyway, the thing about her waltz is… that it wasn’t even in waltz time, at least from what I paid attention to it.

The producers could have pulled any dance label out of a hat and given it to the talking heads and they would have used that term to describe Harper’s performance.

Words have meaning… or not?