The novelist Bret Easton Ellis annoyed young people in an interview this week. “I mean, what is millennial culture?” he asked. “There’s no writing. They don’t care about literature. None of them reads books.” The only culture they have, he said, is “cancel culture”. But what is that?
“Someone said it about me today, ‘Let’s cancel Bret Easton Ellis’,” he explained. “The word gets used all the time, ‘We’re going to cancel this person, she shouldn’t have tweeted that, she’s cancelled’.” Indeed: where once you might “cancel” a train booking or a TV show, it became possible in 2013 or so to “cancel” a human being, meaning to withdraw your admiration.
This is, arguably, in line with the sense of “cancel” whereby a legal document is annulled: the offending celebrity is rendered invalid as a source of enjoyment or wisdom.
The phrase “cancel culture” became mainstream in 2018 as more and more humans were officially cancelled. Easton Ellis might be reassured, though, to remember that “cancel” comes from the Latin cancelli, cross-hatching, and literally means to obliterate writing by drawing lines through it. If millennials buy his books to do that, he’ll still get the royalties.
