This is probably going to get me some odd looks, but this makes me think about Jane Austen!
It’s so funny, but so deeply dependent on this specific moment in time, in 2016, when Adele is all over the damned radio, and nobody (in this really specific cultural sphere) needs context for the joke, and part of the joke is that nobody needs context for the joke.
There’s a bit in Pride and Prejudice where Elizabeth and Caroline are walking on the grounds at Netherfield, and they bump into Darcy and Mrs. Hurst. Caroline, who’s trying really hard to get Darcy to put a ring on it, immediately attaches herself to his free arm, leaving Lizzie kinda awkwardly stranded, since the path in the garden is only wide enough for three. Darcy’s embarrassed by this blatant rudeness, and tries to say, “Hey, let’s go walk someplace else, where we can all fit,” but Lizzie, who thinks they’re all a bunch of boring losers and wants an excuse to ditch them, retorts, “You are charmingly group’d, and appear to uncommon advantage. The picturesque would be spoilt by admitting a fourth.”
The year Austen wrote P&P, everybody was obsessed with this guy named William Gilpin and his ideas about art and nature appreciation. “Picturesque” was the word used to describe ideal landscapes, and by ideal Gilpin et al literally meant things like “that hill is adorned with the correct number of cows.” Three is a pleasing number for cows on hillsides (and otters on otterslides!); four is gauche.
And that example was so well known that that is certainly what Lizzie was alluding to, and all four characters, and most of Austen’s educated readership, would have known it. Lizzie just called them a bunch of cows and ran off.
This is why Jane Austen is my favourite.
Tumblr, you are my other favourite.
This has been a post.
And in a maybe-nicely-circular moment, @stultiloquentia, I didn’t even parse what the picture was saying until I read you saying ‘Adele’…
Kimchi and Justice 