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How did the world manage to live without the phrase "popular culture" until the late 1960s, when an American literature professor, who died last week, began to propagate it? Ray Browne was a scholar who studied accepted classics such as Moby Dick, but in 1967 he founded the Journal of Popular Culture and the Popular Culture Library at Bowling Green State University in Ohio.

At that time, comic strips had existed for at least six decades, and television and rock 'n' roll had come to stay, but somehow a term for all that was lacking. Though the phrase "pop art" may go back as far as 1961, it was itself an encounter between mass-media images and the fine-art tradition, rather than strictly of, by or for the people.

Prof. Browne, who may or may not have first coined "popular culture," saw that the curriculum was neglecting large swaths of the contemporary, not-so-fine arts, but he came to include in popular culture "the fast food...we eat, the clothes we wear, the things we spend our money for...virtually our whole world."

The word "culture" itself in something like the modern sense, as some sort of distinct, aesthetic realm, emerged in Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment, published in 1790, but in the 19th century anthropologists began to use it to mean a people's set of customs - usually in a preliterate society. Prof. Browne, who was respectful toward hamburgers, shopping malls, gum wrappers and bumper stickers, as well as Batman, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber and the late Farrah Fawcett's hair, evidently used "culture" in both the artistic and anthropological senses.

He once said that the old word "folklore" and "popular culture" meant essentially the same thing, and he often pointed out that Shakespeare spanned a whole range from high to low culture, for the full range of classes. But that still meant that there were high-low distinctions. All this is less clear in modern democracy. Many of the rich are quite as attached to popular culture as many of the poor; cultural differences no longer correspond to differences of net worth. Prof. Browne has left his mark on us all.

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