It's hard to know what "crunchy" means. People have used it both as a compliment and as an insult. The trend seems to favour the compliment, but the number-crunching jury is still out.
To begin with, it refers to something crisp that makes a loud sound when bitten or crushed. Crunch owes something to the 17th-century verb "cranch," which may have been a variation on "crash" and had relatives in the long-obsolete words "scranch" and "craunch." (Sounds like a Dickensian law firm: Cranch, Scranch and Craunch.) The Oxford English Dictionary finds its first citation of crunch in the early 1800s, and suspects the word may have originated under the influence of crush and munch.
"Crunchy" arrived by the 1890s, and between the noun and the adjective the world hasn't looked back. We use crunch to describe the point at which events reach a climax; the crunch has come, she reacts well in a crunch, as though someone's teeth had closed decisively. Winston Churchill referred in 1939 to "the outcome of the European crunch." By 1959, intricate harmonies of singers were referred to as crunchy, a word that by the 1980s extended to crisp guitar chords. (In a Nov. 10 review of a concert by the Who, California's Orange County Register referred to "the crunchy guitar riffs of I Can't Explain.") By the 1980s, exercise coaches were referring to sit-ups as abdominal crunches. Totting up figures and analyzing balance sheets became known as crunching the numbers, as though one were cracking them open to expose kernels of meaning within.
The rise of the hippie movement in the 1960s and 70s brought the reactionary term "crunchy-granola" to describe, usually pejoratively, the often blissful talk of embracing Mother Earth and saving the planet. The phrase, from one of the natural foods that populated the health-food stores (and are now common currency in supermarkets), is often shortened to crunchy, as in the lead-in to an Oct. 18 Globe and Mail article: "San Francisco has always been an alt capital, with progressive politics and a penchant for Sixties kitsch. But the city isn't quite as crunchy as it used to be." The journal Minnesota Lawyer used the full term on Nov. 10: "While meditation may sound too crunchy-granola to many hardened lawyers, the simple truth is that the benefits of quieting and relaxing the mind for 20 or more minutes a day cannot be seriously debated."
Perhaps one or more of those meanings fed this line in a review of the new James Bond film - Quantum of Solace, or Centime of Koalas, or whatever it's called - in the Nov. 7 issue of Entertainment Weekly. "Like Casino Royale," the review said, "the action in this film has an edgier, extra-crunchy vibe." That stopped me cold. It could, of course, simply refer to bones being crunched, as so many are in Bond films. But there seems more to the mention, as though being crunchy were a virtue in itself. A visit to the online Urban Dictionary (urbandictionary.com) turned up the usual scattershot array of definitions submitted by readers, including crunchy as lusty (he's crunchy for her) and crunchy as keeping one's cool (the way the cereal Cap'n Crunch reportedly stays crunchy even in milk). But a few of them offered crunchy as a synonym for good, excellent and even "absolutely super-cool," as in, "That's the crunchiest thing I've ever heard."
I am put in mind of a 2006 review in The American Spectator by Florence King, who was perplexed by a book by Rod Dreher called Crunchy Cons, about the complexity of conservatives. "I thought 'crunchy' had to do with granola," King wrote. "But no; 'crunchy' is slang for 'earthy,' he states, and leaves it at that. ... I tried two dictionaries and a thesaurus, but all of them relate 'crunch' to loud chewing or grinding, or to accounting, as in numbers crunching. Dreher never does explain, so we will have to conclude that his dictionary is not as other dictionaries, which wouldn't surprise me a bit."
The crunchy watch continues.
