Bose’s $350 QuietComfort 3 model, introduced in 2006, has a fold-flat design for easier portability, ensuring sonic isolation as you navigate the melting pot. And the $300 QuietComfort 2 can now be augmented with a “mobile communications kit” for your cellphone.

The headline for the column is "The Silence Generation." The subhead? "QuietComfort Headphones." The "TM" is implied.

Then there's the Times' T Magazine, ostensibly about style but at heart a celebration of products and consumption itself. It followed in the footsteps of the Financial Times' shamelessly named How To Spend It, and is so fabulously profitable that it will be aped by the Wall Street Journal in the form of WSJ. magazine.

Your typical hack at an elite newspaper, one suspects, is not so much opposed to selling out to crass commercialism as he is opposed to doing so ineffectively, without an elegant sheen of respectability and fig leaf of journalistic contemplation that makes a money-grubbing endeavor so much more palatable to the writerly ego. Sales jocks could never understand off such a maneuver. They are way too honest.

GIVEN:
Splitting checks at restaurants is difficult—"palm dampening, heart-palpitating anxiety attack" difficult:

[I]t's that inevitable, uncomfortable moment when some self-appointed school-committee type" grabs the check, squints at it, performs a mysterious algorithm and loudly announces what everyone owes, which includes a portion of Birthday Person's meal, of course.

STATEMENTS:

1. Poverty is not funny:

"Order the biggest dinner you can," advised a struggling stand-up comic, whose cousin's 30th-birthday of 10..."It was one of those super-overpriced, nothing-on-the-plate places, and everyone was gorging — ordering two, three, four dishes. And lots of wine." In a vain attempt to be frugal, the comedian ordered but a starter of dumplings, washing them down with tap water. When the bill came, her abstemiousness was ignored; she wound up putting $50 dollars on a credit card.

"After age 30, it's tacky," the paralegal said — though surely some slack can be cut for Manhattanites whose apartments are too small to entertain in. But what's the excuse of that successful actress who recently gave a birthday dinner for herself in a private room at a pricey steakhouse in Beverly Hills and, at the end of boisterous evening, solicited $100 contributions from each invitee? (The drinks were on her, she announced magnanimously.) "In my mind, 'private room' should be synonymous with 'prepaid,'" said one bitter attendee.

3. Experts are baffled:

"In my experience, when you host a thing like this, you always end up 10 percent short," said — believe it — a math professor. "Is it because, out of 20 people, one or two will just forget to pay entirely? Or because everyone slightly undercalculates what they owe? Who Knows?"

And in the end, who cares? We need not abandon the idea of parties in restaurants altogether.

You Do the Math [T, not yet online]

Hangover
Hang over /(han go\ vr) / n. / unpleasant physical effects after the heavy consumption of alcohol, as in, "I think I overdid it with the eggnog — I woke up with a hangover I could sell to science"; a vestige; a holdover, e.g., "Mom, presents are such a hangover from last century — just give me cash."

One-Off
One-off / (wun o {lcub}f{rcub}) / n. / a Britishism for something happening, done or made only once, as in, "I want a one-off that I won't see coming or going — a custom Louis Vuitton mah-jongg set would be nice, or a little Burberry trench coat for my labradoodle."

Regift
Re gift / (re\ gift) / v. / a Seinfeldian term for giving an unwanted gift to someone else, as in, "That's the ugliest sweater I've ever seen. You should give it to charity or regift it to your mother-in-law." Many happy returns!

Hangover? One-off? Regift? Where do people find these crazy words? Thank you, New York Times. We have no idea how we'd get through life without you.

The Talk [T/NYT]