I have lately been fascinated with the construction “X-era Y”.

WWII-era bombers. Disco-era fashion. Roman-era architecture. Elizabethan-era slang. These all mean something, and you probably have a fair mental picture of what they mean (e.g., B-29s, bell-bottoms, aqueducts, Forsooth!). You don’t really see anything wrong with the phrase “WWII-era bombers” because, well, bombers and WWII had a lot to do with each other! Like, you can write an essay tracing the evolution of bombers, and WWII is probably going to get a section.

But, as often it is in grammar, we can get much weirder.

The Obama era lasted from January 2009 to January 2017, so Obama-era foreign policy refers to foreign policy during that period. Simple enough. So can you also talk about Obama-era dresses, Reagan-era fonts, Neopets-era prisons? Not that the Obama administration had as much control over hemlines as it did over foreign policy, but if “Obama-era” simply means “2009–2017”, then sure, you ought to be able to refer to things like that.

Bush-era K-pop? McCarthy-era Bollywood? Sure! That’s just K-pop in the 2001–2009 period, and so forth. That Bush and K-pop come from different geographic regions is irrelevant; whether you lived in New York or Seoul, 2001–2009 was 2001–2009. Crucially, “Bush-era K-pop” does not fail to refer to something. It may take a few seconds for you to think, “Oh, she’s talking about the 2000s, so Brown Eyed Girls, Big Bang, that sort of thing”, but you’ll get there eventually.

And so: Twitter-era sculpture, Jim Crow-era spelling, Soul Train-era comic books. Gilded Age Stravinsky, Taliban-era anime, Rodgers & Hammerstein-era France. #MeToo-era cuisine, Jazz Age swords, Mao-era drugs.

There may have been Street Fighter-era video games, but there was also Street Fighter-era lingerie (the Wonderbra). Hays Code-era cinema, but also Hays Code-era baby names (Tammy). COVID-era social distancing, but also COVID-era container ships (Ever Given).

Sometimes the era can get very specific. The thank u, next era (roughly: from the release of thank u, next in November 2018 to the end of the Sweetener World Tour in December 2019) only makes sense in the context of Ariana Grande. But can you talk about thank u, next-era Taylor Swift (ME!, You Need to Calm Down, Lover)? Swifties would be confused, but otherwise why not?

Can you say things like The Soviet era was followed by the hip-hop soul era?

Okay. How far can we take this? Can literally any X and any Y go together?

Maybe one way this can fail is if Y never actually existed during the time of X. Like I Love Lucy-era NFTs, Victorian-era Internet security, Biblical-era aviation, Reionization-era hospitals. As much fun it would be to imagine Mary Magdalene in a biplane dogfight, no such thing happened. But you could also argue that these still make sense; they’re still well-defined phrases (that just happen to refer to nothing), in the sense that “odd perfect number” is a perfectly respectable mathematical concept, whether or not odd perfect numbers exist.

It can get worse.

Sometimes X-era means something different depending on what Y is.

“Phase One-era” means something different in the context of U.S.-China intellectual property issues (2020–2021) than in the context of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–2012). So then what could Phase One-era street art be? Phase One-era memes: are they lolcats and “all ur base”, or Bernie’s mittens and the Milk Crate challenge? Maybe due to its vagueness and generality, “Phase One” really is empty outside of a context.

But more specific X’s can also fail in the same way: compare Drew Carey-era Whose Line Is It Anyway? (1998–2007) with Drew Carey-era The Price Is Right (2007–present).

Can Y mean something different depending on what X is? Things get knottier.

Compare Teenage Dream-era memories, Arab Spring-era memories, and Angry Birds-era memories. The eras are pretty much the same (roughly 2010–2012). But to me one conjure an electro-pop pastel throw-your-hands-in-the-air-like-you-just-don’t-care slumber party summer, one evokes bloody revolution, the anger of the people rising up against their dictators, and one brings to mind simpler you’re-a-kid-wasting-time-on-your-mum’s-smartphone times. Are these the same memories?

Possible counter-argument: just like that parable where a bunch of blind people touch different parts of an elephant and come to completely different conclusions about the nature of the creature they’re caressing, all of these memories are just aspects of something bigger that we can call “2010–2012 memories.”

The Trump era and the #MeToo era are roughly the same time period. Are “Trump-era social norms” and “#MeToo-era social norms” referring to the same thing, in the sense that “Trump-era cuisine” and “#MeToo-era cuisine” refer to the same thing?

I think what we are stumbling upon is the denotation-connotation distinction. Remember, a term’s denotation is its objective dictionary definition, whereas its connotation is the whole web of associations we’ve woven around it as a culture. “Cat” denotes a domesticated feline, but it connotes many different things: adorable, divine, lazy, scheming for world domination. Remember Russell’s conjugations: one person’s liberator is another’s invader. Taxes and revenue enhancements. Enablement and empowerment. I think we’ve been dancing around this distinction the whole time.

“Trump-era social norms” and “#MeToo-era social norms” have the same denotation, but different connotations. That makes them dangerous to talk about. You can use connotations to deceive, to sneak in weird emphases, to claim that the elephant is actually all tusks. Be very, very careful when you’re talking about things that have different connotations to different people.

In contrast, I don’t know what connotations “Trump-era cuisine” and “#MeToo-era cuisine” have, but they’re probably extremely weird and nobody’s thought about them. That probably means they don’t have well-defined connotations, and if you hear them you’ll likely reduce them to their bare denotations. Late-2010s cuisine. So it’s probably safe to say them—weird, but a safe kind of weird. Probably.

Anyhow. Paleozoic celebrity culture.