Dyed in the wool?

Reader question:

Please explain this sentence: “John has always been a dyed-in-the-wool vinyl fan.” Dyed-in-the-wool?

My comments:

Here, dyed-in-the-wool means that John has always kept listening to vinyl records, those large flat discs that are rarely found in the market place today.

Vinyl is short for polyvinyl, as vinyl discs are made from polyvinyl chloride.

The young generation all listen to music from MP3 or, if you’re older than 30 years old, CD players. Most of them do at any rate and they’re forgiven for having not a clue what a vinyl disc is but, back in the day, before the advent of digital music in the afore-mentioned CD (compact disc) and MP3 (MPEG Audio Layer-3) formats.

As a matter of fact, vinyl dominated the music-listening market until only the 1980s, when CDs took over.

Nowadays, of course, MP3 is the thing.

Oh, there were also the cassette tapes, which were popular during the 1960-1980s.

However, to music aficionados like John, vinyl still sounds the best to the ear. Therefore, John has stuck with vinyl while technology has moved on.

Dyed-in-the-wool means John probably will never change.

Dyed-in-the-wool, you see, originally refers to one of the ways wool is dyed before it is woven into cloth. If it’s dyed after being woven into cloth, then the color can be uneven and fade easily. On the other hand, if the wool is dyed before being woven into cloth, then its color won’t fade because the dye is deeply engrained into each and every piece of thread.

Hence, when we describe someone as dyed in the wool, we mean to say they’re stubborn and unchangeable, steadfast in their belief or behavior.

In other words, John as a dyed-in-the-wool vinyl fan means he’s a vinyl lover through and through – utterly, thoroughly and completely. He never will give up vinyl for CDs and MP3s or whatever technology may come up with later.

In other words, he is a die-hard vinyl man.

Got it?

All right. More media examples to help reinforce the point:

1. “I believe it is inevitable that the economic pressure of fragmentation will drive us to produce newspapers, TV news, radio news and interactive news out of a common newsroom,” said Jack Fuller, president of Tribune Publishing, in a January keynote address to a Poynter Institute conference.

Fuller, author of “News Values: Ideas for an Information Age,” is a dyed-in-the-wool newsman. A former editor of the Chicago Tribune, a Pulitzer Prize winner and a staunch defender of journalistic independence, he now heads the newspaper arm of one of the most powerful media companies in America. Tribune is the third largest newspaper chain in the country, but unlike Gannett and Knight-Ridder, its presence is concentrated in the largest metropolitan markets. In addition to the Chicago Tribune, Tribune publishes the L.A. Times and New York's Newsday. Since it has also owned the Chicago Cubs for just over twenty years, one may guess that Tribune is well ahead of the pack when it comes to convergence. Indeed, it has a long history of investment in broadcasting, owning 24 major-market television stations. It just bought another in April.

That points to one of the likely consequences of convergence: more consolidation of media ownership as the giants among newspaper companies extend their reach.

Last July, Fuller testified before the Federal Communications Commission – “as passionately as I could,” he says -- asking it to dump the cross-ownership ban on owning newspapers and television stations in the same market. Because of grandfathered ownership, Tribune already owns both in the top three markets of New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. Fuller says Tribune sees lots more opportunities if the ban on same-market ownership is lifted, as is widely expected to happen. If so, large media companies will go shopping for acquisitions and will likely swap properties among themselves so that they end up with same-market newspapers and TV stations.

The upside for Tribune, Fuller told OJR, would be the capacity to spread the costs of its news operations across multiple distribution systems. His newspaper people will reap the revenue benefit and he sees no downside as long as they are firmly empowered by Tribune to protect their editorial independence. The net effect on his newspapers? It would help preserve the economic basis of their world-class news operations, Fuller says.

Increased concentration of media power in a few hands is an inevitable consequence of the “radical fragmentation” of the media market, Fuller says.

“How do you finance great journalism into the 21st century?” he asks rhetorically. “Keeping your enterprise small and singular is probably not the right answer.”

- Newspapers in the Digital Age, OJR.org, May 1, 2002.

2. The economist Pedro Pablo Kuczynski won Peru’s Presidential election this week, beating his rival, Keiko Fujimori, the daughter of a disgraced and imprisoned former President, by the thinnest of margins—a mere thirty-nine thousand votes out of nearly eighteen million cast. In every sense, Kuczynski is a member of his country’s social, political, and economic élite. Seventy-seven years old, he was educated at Exeter College, Oxford, and at Princeton; he has, at various points in his career, worked at senior levels of the World Bank, been an investment banker on Wall Street and a mine manager in Guinea, and has served as Peru’s Prime Minister, minister of economy and finance, and minister of energy and mines. He is also a onetime student of the Royal College of Music, an accomplished flautist and pianist, and the owner of a white grand piano that once belonged to Noël Coward.

Kuczynski, or P.P.K., as he is popularly known, for the initials of his name, is a first-generation Peruvian. He is the son of a German-Jewish doctor, Maxime Hans Kuczynski, a renowned tropical-disease specialist who left Hitler’s Germany for Peru in 1936. Among other legacies, the elder Kuczynski helped found the leprosarium of San Pablo, in the Peruvian Amazon, where the young Argentine medical student Ernesto Guevara, soon to become Che, volunteered for a time in the early nineteen-fifties. Kuczynski’s French-Swiss mother, Madeleine Godard, was a teacher of literature and music. Kuczynski’s full name, in fact, is Pedro Pablo Kuczynski Godard—Jean Luc Godard, the film director, is his first cousin. His brother Miguel was the head tutor at Pembroke College, Cambridge; an uncle was a Nobel Laureate for Medicine. And so on. His longtime friend, the former journalist Christopher Roper, told me, “It is impossible to think of a Latin-American head of state over the past hundred years with the intellectual distinction, independence of mind, and cultural breadth of P.P.K.”

The ties that bind Kuczynski to the wider world are not only European. His first wife was an American named Jane Casey, the daughter of Joseph Casey, a congressman from Massachusetts. His second wife, Nancy Lange, also an American, is a first cousin of the actress Jessica Lange. One of Kuczynski’s daughters, Alex Kuczynski, is a former journalist for the New York Observer and the Times, and the author the book “Beauty Junkies: Inside our $15 Billion Obsession with Plastic Surgery.” Kuczynski himself had U.S. citizenship, which he renounced only last November, in order to run for Peru’s Presidency.

P.P.K.’s electoral victory bears examination, first of all, because, as his friend Roper pointed out, someone of his worldly pedigree is rare in a region with a longstanding penchant for folksy populists and authoritarians: Hugo Chávez, Álvaro Uribe, Daniel Ortega, and Cristina Kirchner come to mind, along with a long slew of others going back in time. Nor does P.P.K. fit into the current Latin-American political trend, in which powerful leftist governments, such as those in Argentina and Brazil, have been swept aside by the right. Kuczynski is a center-right Keynesian, while Keiko Fujimori, like her father, is a dyed-in-the-wool right-wing populist. Intriguingly, Kuczynski’s victory is due, at least partly, to the last-minute support he received from the Peruvian left. This is something new for Latin America, which has always veered toward obstinate, spit-in-your-eye polarizations over rational political compromises. The idea of a bipartisan political movement is almost unheard of.

- A surprising coalition brings a new leader to Peru, NewYorker.com, June 10, 2016.

3. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie got into the groove this week as he twisted and shouted with wild abandon at a Bruce Springsteen concert.

The Garden State leader danced away at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, heaving his waist from side to side, pumping his arms, playing air guitar and singing along as Springsteen treated fans to a four-hour show Tuesday night.

Christie’s entertaining moves prompted many devotees of “The Boss” to turn their cell phone cameras on the governor and post the videos on YouTube.

Christie seemed to know all of Springsteen’s lyrics by heart as he sang and shimmied to such crowd-pleasers as “Born to Run,” “Hungry Heart,” “Dancing in the Dark” and “Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out.”

That’s not surprising since he’s been a dyed-in-the-wool fan of the rock ’n roll icon and his E-Street Band since he was a teenager and has attended close to 140 Springsteen concerts.

But Christie wasn’t the only well-known mover and shaker at the gig in which Springsteen belted out 34 songs before some 82,000 rabid rockers.

Also seen bopping along was Jon Stewart, former host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”

- Chris Christie Dances Up a Storm at Springsteen Soiree, NewsMax.com, September 1, 2016.

About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.