The suffix that turns any noun into an aesthetic — -core — as the fragment that travelled from hardcore punk through 'normcore' in 2013 to a 2020s vocabulary in which cottage, goblin, clown, bloke, tennis, mermaid and 'under-consumption' could each have a core. The record's entry for the most abused four letters in the dictionary, including its own 'corecore'.
The record notes '-core' and '-punk' are not interchangeable: -punk implies a politics that nobody practises, and -core implies a wardrobe that everybody buys.
The record notes -core once meant a commitment (hardcore, grindcore) and now means a Pinterest board, and that the shift from music to mood board took about thirty years and one trend-forecasting collective.
What does it mean? Write it the way you would say it out loud.
