The teams at Grand Central Life & Style, a Grand Central Publishing imprint, and goop, a digital publication focused on lifestyle content, have formed a new imprint called goop press. Goop was founded by Oscar-winning actress Gwyneth Paltrow and currently headed by CEO Lisa Gersh.
According to the press release, “acquisitions and editorial decisions will be made by a team of goop editors, including founder and curator Paltrow, CEO Gersh, and editorial director Elise Loehnen, with Grand Central Life & Style’s VP, editorial director Karen Murgolo.” The staff at goop press plan to release “one goop-branded book” and three other projects on a yearly basis.
In April 2016, a new cookbook by Paltrow entitled It’s All Easy: Delicious Weekday Recipes for the Super-Busy Home Cook will be published. Paltrow had this statement about this new venture: “With so much incredible content now being produced at goop.com on a daily basis, we’re excited to memorialize it for audiences across the world.”
By Simon Thomas
Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin (better known as an Oscar-winning actress and the Grammy-winning lead singer of Coldplay respectively) recently announced that they would be separating. While the news of any separation is sad, we can’t deny that the report also carried some linguistic interest. In the announcement, on Paltrow’s lifestyle site Goop, the pair described the end of their marriage as a “conscious uncoupling.” So … what does that mean?
The phrase was picked up by journalists, commentators, and tweeters around the world. Some called it pretentious, some thought it wise, others simply didn’t know what was going on. Let’s have a look into the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and see what we can learn about these words.
Conscious is perhaps the less controversial word of the pair. A look through the Oxford Thesaurus of English brings up adjectives like aware, deliberate, intentional, and considered. But did you know that the earliest recorded use of conscious related only to misdeeds? The OED currently dates the word to 1573, with the definition “having awareness of one’s own wrongdoing, affected by a feeling of guilt.” This sense is now confined to literary contexts, but it was only a few decades before the general sense “having knowledge or awareness; able to perceive or experience something” became common. The idea of it being used as an adjective referring to a deliberate action came later, in 1726, according to the OED’s current research.
Portrait of Geoffrey Chaucer by Thomas Hoccleve in the Regiment of Princes
The verb uncouple has an intriguing history. The current earliest evidence in the OED dates to the early fourteenth century, where it means “to release (dogs) from being fastened together in couples; to set free for the chase.” Interestingly, this is found earlier than its opposite (“to tie or fasten (dogs) together in pairs”), currently dated to c.1400 in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In c.1386, in the hands of Chaucer and “The Monk’s Tale,” uncouple is given a figurative use:
He maked hym so konnyng and so sowple
That longe tyme it was er tirannye
Or any vice dorste on hym vncowple.
The wider meaning “to unfasten, disconnect, detach” arrives in the early sixteenth century, and that is where things rested for some centuries.
The twentieth century saw another couple of uncouples – one of which is applicable to the Paltrow-Martins, and one of which refers to a very different field. In 1948, a biochemical use is first recorded – which the OED defines “to separate the processes of (phosphorylation) from those of oxidation.” But six years earlier, an American Thesaurus of Slang includes the word as a synonym for “to divorce,” and this forms the earliest example found in the OED sense defined as “to separate at the end of a relationship.” Other instances of uncouple meaning “to split up” can be found in a 1977 Washington Post article and one from the Boston Globe in 1989.
So, despite all the attention given to the term “conscious uncoupling,” people have been uncoupling in exactly the same way as Gwyneth and Chris – and using the same word – since at least 1942. So perhaps not quite as controversial as some commentators suggested.
A version of this article originally appeared on the OxfordWords blog.
Simon Thomas blogs at Stuck-in-a-Book.co.uk.
Subscribe to the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Subscribe to only language articles on the OUPblog via email or RSS.
Image: Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
The post Word histories: conscious uncoupling appeared first on OUPblog.
Cookbook ghostwriter Julia Moskin published a damning essay about the cookbook writing world in the New York Times, sharing her experiences as one of the “ink-stained (and grease-covered) wretches” who help write cookbooks.
Both Gwyneth Paltrow and Rachael Ray have criticized the article. Gotham Ghostwriters collected responses from working ghostwriters about the essay. They rejected the negative perspective on the profession and offered some useful advice for aspiring ghostwriters. Check it out:
Adds Melanie, “It takes a special personality to be a ghostwriter. You have to be okay with letting someone else take the spotlight. The satisfaction comes from helping others fulfill their dreams.” And Sheila puts it even more bluntly: “As for credit, the only important place for your name is on the check.
continued…
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media.
“Could I use butter and cheese and eggs in my cooking without going down some kind of hippie shame spiral? Yes. Of course I could.” — cookbook author, Gwyneth Paltrow
-
Folks, I’m fresh back from a pretty great trip visiting schools on Long Island and Irvington, NY. So here’s a quick one, too good not to share.
I mean to say: Nice to be home. And, oh yes, I’m always up for a satiric, dramatic reading of any too-serious text. While Kristen Wiig’s take on the poetry of Suzanne Somers remains a personal favorite, here’s a recent performance by Robert Acquire reading from Gwyneth Paltrow’s autobiographical cookbook stew, My Father’s Daughter. Enjoy!
Gwyneth Paltrow's latest Goop newsletter boasts an excellent list of children's books that come highly recommended by a wonderful group of celebrities and children's book specialists.
.jpg?picon=679)
