admass
English
[edit]Etymology
[edit]From ad + mass, coined by British novelist J. B. Priestley.[1]
Noun
[edit]admass (uncountable)
- (dated, British) That part of society that is influenced by mass media advertising. [from 1955]
References
[edit]- ^ Tony Judt (2005) “The Age of Affluence”, in Postwar: A history of Europe since 1945, London: Vintage Books, published 2010, →ISBN:
- Across the English Channel, in that same year, a group of middle-class activists, perturbed at the unmediated impact of commercial advertising and the effloresence of commodities it was selling, published the first-ever consumer guide in Europe. Significantly, they named it not ‘What’ but Which? This was the brave new world that the British novelist J. B. Priestly described in 1955 as ‘admass’.
Further reading
[edit]- “admass”, in Lexico, Dictionary.com; Oxford University Press, 2019–2022.