please. stop using the word bespoke. it sucks.

The summer of 2001 harked a great many things for me. It was the summer right after high school ended and right before college started. It was a summer of sunshine, soft Georgia nights, goodbye parties and the new prickling feeling that we were about to leave childhood forever and Grow Up. It was also the summer when pointy toed shoes from the fashion houses of Europe enacted a swift and irreversable coup that changed the face of women's footware as we knew it.

My friends and I viewed the trend when it started as a passing fad. Pointy shoes? Really? Shoes that make your feet at least an inch and a half bigger? Shoes that squeezed your big toe into your other four? Shoes that were basically a Western answer to Eastern foot binding?? They were impractical, witchy looking, stupid, not for us. Sure they were all over the catwalks but surely they'd be the kind of fad that was only Good For Magazines...and Europeans.

Over the course of two short months, I watched, with increasing dismay, as all around me rounded pumps were replaced by severe, pinched stilettos. On the streets, women's walks shifted from the easy, bouncy gait afforded to them by sensible rounded toe shoes to a dainty teeter in their new, shockingly pointy Fendi's.

I started noticing, to my horror, how one by one all my friends fell to the trend, their shoe collections changing by the minute to accomodate their new purchases. Pointed toe flats, pointed toe heels, pointed toed going out shoes, pointed toe... flip flops?! Well, we all know how the pointed shoe trend has manifested itself - now women everywhere are joined in solidarity as they they gingerly pry their oh so cute but painful shoes off their blistered red feet at the end of a long day. Awesome.

So back to the original purpose of this post. Like pointy shoes infiltrating closets everywhere at the start of the millenium, the word bespoke has insiduiously infiltrated the word scene. Bespoke as a past tense of the verb bespeak is actually a really nice word; however, bespoke as in the adjective for customized is incredibly pompous and obnoxious. I first read it in a british Vogue, where the word was used not just in the headline but also no less than 10 times in the actual body of the article itself. I had discounted the overuse of a rather ugly word as a freak occurance in a badly-written passage, a British colloquialism perhaps.

This was three months ago.

In the past week alone, I have heard it used both verbally and in emails around my office, written in various online blogs which I respect and enjoy AND in magazines that hail not just from England. Shocking and terrible. Bespoke sucks and is totally overused by not very clever people (sorry co-workers, this doesn't apply to you) trying to sound smart. Please people, stop the madness. Let us remember the pointy shoe infection of 2001. Ten years down the line do we really want to sound like overpuffed windbags using ugly words? I think not.