Notes & Asides

■ Dear Mr. Buckley: My sister attends Bates College in Maine, and shared with me a delicious new word. It’s a hybrid, actually, used to describe many of the students there who choose a ragged, progressive identity despite their genteel prosperity. It’s a look achieved through managed self- denial of grooming and shoe repair, a sort of active neglect.

The word is Trustafarian, a combination of trust, as in trust fund, and Rastafarian, as in the rather frazzled- looking Jamaican sect.