The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #101751   Message #2055754
Posted By: GUEST,Val
18-May-07 - 02:30 PM
Thread Name: 'Anglicana' - is this a new word?
Subject: RE: 'Anglicana' - is this a new word?
I seem to recall the term "Americana" being applied to plenty of things other than music for a goodly number of years. Most often to junque being sold as "Collectible" that seems to have an Olde-Timey feel and often "patriotic-seeming" or at least identifiably-American theme (carvings or paintings or beer steins including flags, stylized eagles, Mississippi riverboats and the like), but which is not old enough to pass as "Antique".

"Americana" seems to be primarily a label to help categorize stuff for sale - I am not aware of the word being used in any serious scholarship or history.

Words like Celtic, English, Folk, Traditional, etc. often ARE used with more-or-less precise definitions in serious study. Granted, they have also been co-opted by people who wish to shoehorn commodities such as music into marketing pigeonholes, but the words do continue to be used in other sense as well.

Anglicana is probably a good word to use when referring to the commodity-pigeonholing need rather than for any historical or linguistically-accurate purpose. And it needn't be associated with the Anglican church any more that Method Acting must be associated with the Methodist church.

Along the same line, perhaps a similar word could be coined for the neo-Celtic marketing craze. Celticana? Celtish? Celtoid? Alas, it's probably too late to make that change now.

Val