Taylor Swift at the ACC

On Friday, when my buddy Bert, ace framer and knowledgeable art appraiser asked, “What’s everyone doing this weekend?” My wife and I explained that the girls were going to see Taylor Swift at the Air Canada Centre on Saturday. “Who are they?” he asked.

I assume that not everyone is in to popular culture, and there are some people out there who don’t know who Taylor Swift is. I ran into a person last week who didn’t know Martin Short went to McMaster University, one of the local facts that everyone knows. I find a few local people who never heard of the Dundas Valley School of Art, which I find amazing because I spend my life making sure everyone does know about us.

My friend Bert may know about Tom Swifties, a popular linguistic anomaly of the dimly lit past.

Wikipedia says, “A Tom Swifty (or Tom Swiftie) is a phrase in which a quoted sentence is linked by a pun to the manner in which it is attributed. Tom Swifties may be considered a type of Wellerism.

The name comes from the Tom Swift series of books (1910–1993), similar in many ways to the better-known Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew series, and, like them, produced by the Stratemeyer Syndicate. In this series, the young scientist hero, Tom Swift, underwent adventures involving rocket ships, ray-guns and other things he had invented. A stylistic idiosyncrasy of at least some books in this series was that the author, "Victor Applegate," went to great trouble to avoid repetition of the unadorned word "said"; elegant variation used a different quotative verb, or modifying adverbial words or phrases. Since many adverbs end in "ly" this kind of pun was originally called a Tom Swiftly, the prime example being "We must hurry," said Tom Swiftly. At some point, this kind of humor was called a Tom Swifty, and that name is now more prevalent.
The Tom Swifty, then, is a parody of this style with the incorporation of a pun.

Now, this is about Taylor Swift, or at least an offshoot of that event.
The girls took the train in from Burlington to Toronto, and walked the two blocks to the ACC. On return, they did the same thing. I was not there to see the event, but I saw the second train return at 12:43 a.m., as I was picking them up. I will assume the first train was full, and this was just the Burlington bound crowd, but I have never seen so many white teen girls of a certain age, in a single place in my time, at least not since a Monkees concert years ago. They were all mostly tall and thin, and trying for Taylor Swift lookalike status.

It’s funny, I guess, how so many girl performers attract girl fans. Maybe boys just don’t go to concerts that much, or maybe just metal shows. Easy for me to figure girls attracted to boy band stuff, but I never got the girl to girl performer attachment, but it’s big.

It seems to me if I were a young guy; I’d start hanging out at Taylor Swift, Avril Lavigne and other girl performers who attract large audiences of young girls’ concerts.