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Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. *Smarm is a kind of performance-an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. He would rather talk about smarm, which he defines like this: Scocca is reluctant to explain just what he means by snark. We live instead in an age of smarm- and here, Scocca argues, in a succinct eight and a half thousand words, be the real dragons. We do not live in an age of snark, he says. In Scocca’s view, the proliferating complaints about snark and its dominance have got the whole thing upside down.
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(It also drew a fair number of unique page views: more than “I Can’t Stop Looking At This Weird Chinese Goat,” but less than “Two Minutes Of Nothing But Goats Yelling Like Humans,” which is fairly strong on the Gawker scale of buzz). His bombastic opinion piece “On Smarm” took the online literary world by storm last December, drawing not just affirming nods from fellow smarm-conspiracy theorists but replies from big names like Maureen Dowd and Malcolm Gladwell as well. Or so Tom Scocca, features editor at Gawker, would have it. A specter is haunting the World Wide Web-the specter of smarm.