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meaning - What does “E!” mean in the phrases, a show “makes the debut Sunday E! sets in motion,” and “premiers on E! April 21”?



I came across a new interjection (seemingly) “E!” in the following sentence of the Washington Post (April 18) article titled, “Ryan Lochte, Ke$ha and the rules for celebrity reality shows”.



Ryan Lochte’s bold personal style: The Olympic swimmer’s reality series “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?” premires on E! April 21.


This week marks the debut of two such shows. Sunday, E! sets in motion “What Would Ryan Lochte Do?,” a look at the Olympic swimmer who made headlines at last year’s London games — not so much for his victories and friendly rivalry with teammate Michael Phelps as for a flurry of awkward interviews and self-deluded sound bites (trademarking the frat-thusiastic phrase “Jeah!”) that gave him a party-boy reputation.



What does “E!” mean? Is it an interjection or a capital letter for something associated with TV entertainment programs?


Additionally, is “Jeah” similar with “gee / jee”? Is the word, “ frat-thusiastic” which I presume to be a compound of “fraternity + enthusiastic” (Pls. correct me if I’m wrong) a current English word, or just a coinage by the author?



Answer



In addition to "E!" being the stylized logo for "Entertainment Television" and it's various intellectual properties, the company has a brand of being "Hollywood hip" and so takes liberties with the English language that are anything but standard.


Stylization in branding and art often includes punctuation and nonstandard capitalization, and is indeed confusing to those not familiar- which some would argue is not entirely accidental. An example beyond those already mentioned include the band "fun." and the internet/company "del.icio.us". This has the somewhat amusing side-effect of making the convention of putting punctuation inside quotes problematic, but that's tangential.


On your other questions, "Jeah" is pretty much just an altered pronunciation of "yeah" meant to convey an attitude related to the word "duh"; it's sarcastic, like a stereotypical immature "frat boy".


The word "frat-tastic" is also slightly different in meaning than you expected, as it is using -tastic as an adjective in a combining form. The statement means to convey that the man is especially like a stereotypical fraternity member. The similarity to "enthusiastic" is more or less accidental, as "-tastic" comes from "fantastic". The "-tastic" suffix is in general use, and the author is relying on familiarity with the convention rather than with the "frat-tastic" example itself being a word in common use.


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