For decades, terms like Muzak and elevator music have been affixed contemptuously to sounds deemed too soft and complacent to be taken seriously in a culture obsessed with upward mobility and the grinding friction it produces.
The red curve is the decade term; the green curve is the residual of decade subtracted from original LOD; and the blue curve is interannual variations that seasonal and decade terms have been removed.
That process is repeated during potential second- and third-decade terms.
And while the penalties have grown harsher, in just the past few decades, the term of copyright, which used to match the 19-year patent term, has now grown to more than five times that long.
In recent decades, the term has spiralled inexorably toward meaninglessness.
Despite the fact that researchers have been studying middle age intensively for decades, the term itself seems to have no fixed definition.
But when he is not dressing up for his concerts as a Jedi knight or a morbidly obese gang member, Mr. Yankovic has reflected on whether, after three decades, the term novelty musician still applies to him.
Because the Baath Party was dominated by Sunnis, and ruled ruthlessly over a Shiite majority for decades, the term today also carries sectarian undertones, as was seen Tuesday in Tikrit, Mr. Hussein's hometown in Salahuddin Province, north of Baghdad.
Still, for decades the term has thrived in university literature and history departments and among communities of artists, and it has been associated with pastiche, irony, relativism and iconoclasm.
If these questions seem vague and portentous today – not to mention sexist, of which more below – it is partly because over decades the term itself became so generalised as to be almost invisible.
