SNP’s word of the day: Ectype

Word: Ectype

Meaning: An exact copy. Also, the externalization of an idea, like an archetype, which—when repeated sufficiently—becomes a stereotype.

Usage: To paraphrase the Beastie Boys, “She’s crafty, and she’s just my ectype.”

You should know it because: I was reading the New Yorker’s recent style issue, in which Susan Orlean profiles Jean-Paul Gaultier and briefly meets the model Karlie Kloss. Kloss talks about cloning, which made me wonder why I hadn’t seen it in the movies lately. There were so many wildly futuristic films with clones (so many they were almost clones of each other) when I was like 12: Gattaca, Multiplicity, Alien Resurrection, Blade Runner. And now, nada. Have we given up on our future multiple selves?

Don’t fear. Here to bring back cloning like he brought back other old-school things, like point-and-shoot film photography and unabashed perviness, is Terry Richardson. Yesterday, he posted a stupid video of himself with 100 cardboard “clones” of himself. Really though, not to be a major nerd, but even if human cloning did happen, we could never recreate ourselves so perfectly. Terry’s clones are actually ectypes. Whatever, though. With a hundred skeev-tacular Terry Richardsons, it’s still the scariest screen-representation of cloning since The Clonus Horror.

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