For example, if you're a Canadian former child actor who starred in Degrassi as a teenager, that won't stop you from releasing songs in which you brag about how you "started from the bottom." If you're the child of a successful Nashville songwriter, you can emphasize how said parent was a struggling single mother, to the point of allegedly lying about never knowing your father.
Pascal Le Segretain/Getty Images Entertainment/Getty
"I was born to indigent sharecroppers at the height of the Great Depression."
But we can't really blame these people. We, the general public, like to maintain the belief that there is no real system of class or inherited wealth in this country, and part of this belief is a demand for rags-to-riches stories. Public figures know that their successful careers will appeal to us much more if they hint that they spent their childhood hunting and killing beetles for food rather than taking violin lessons. Despite how widespread it is, there's no word that describes this exaggeration of a famous person's former indigence. So I'll call it "indigeration," because I like my made-up words to sound like obscure Roman sex acts.
926 Comments