Friday, March 15, 2013

Euphemisms

Reading Shelf Awareness this morning -- particularly this article about Kobo describing the difference between their "regular customers" and the influx of new business from ABA stores -- I hit a term I'm not familiar with.

That term is "active romance."

My assumption -- since that's the way my mind always goes -- is that the "active" in "active romance" refers to the characters' genitals, and this is another way of saying "erotica" or "hot romance" or "spicy romance" or whatever last decade's term was; that this indicates a romance with a lot of sex in it, or a book with a lot of sex in it that tries to sneak in as a romance because the main characters stay together. [1]

Anyone out there able to confirm or deny?


[1] I make this distinction because romances, like every other mature genre, have important genre and subgenre markers, and so there are things that look like romance to civilians that real romance readers consider the equivalent of Michael Crichton for SF readers. I don't know enough to define all of those markers, but I'm smart enough to realize that serious romance readers care about them.

1 comment:

Robin said...

Your guess is correct; John Mutter, who wrote the article, speculates that it's Tamblyn's "Canadian humor."

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