Undertheorized.

Alexis C. Madrigal at The Atlantic attempts to explain why the academic journal "Porn Studies" is needed:

[S]o many people look at so much porn... And yet the majority of Americans say looking at porn is "wrong." Porn is a national contradiction baked into the daily ablutions of hundreds of millions of people.

Baked into ablutions, eh? Okay. I don't see much contradiction in the belief that something is wrong and the doing of it anyway. Isn't that part of the charm? Madrigal continues:

So pornography remains undertheorized.

"Undertheorized" is a funny word. Almost as funny as "ablutions." But you see the point: To declare something "undertheorized" is to long for academic study. For example, I found a law review article (humorously) titled "The Under-Theorized Asterisk Footnote" (by Charles A. Sullivan):

The asterisk footnote... identifies the author... This footnote is used by every scholar but analyzed by none. This scholarly inattention is shocking given the remarkable growth and development of the asterisk footnote over the last 40 years. This Article is the first effort to address this gaping lacuna in scholarship. It is my hope (perhaps not my expectation) that it will launch a wave of asteriskian studies that will throw new light on the legal academy.

So... what else is undertheorized? What is overtheorized? What is better left undertheorized?

Who are the people who go into theorizing, and why would they specialize in porn?

(I remember when a certain type of feminist went seriously theoretical over porn. "Pornography is the theory, and rape is the practice." The theory is that it is the theory. But that theory fell out of fashion.)

"My love of footnotes as art form, as commentary, as the place to embed sneaky and wry asides..."

"... that do not belong in the text, only grew and grew through childhood, until I reached college."

A woman who loves footnotes so much she had "n.b." tattooed... on her foot. The woman, s.e. smith, links to Wikipedia to help people understand "n.b." — nota bene — and Wikipedia just gives us the literal and semi-literal translation: "note well" or "pay attention"/"take notice."

Now, I've listened the the audiobook of David Foster Wallace reading "Consider the Lobster" about a thousand times — n.b. David Foster Wallace gluttonously indulged in footnotes — and he does an aside:

n.b. - which means "nota bene," which the audio commandant wants me to tell you means "note well," but actually really means "by the way"...

Here's a reddit discussion of that Wallace aside. They seem to think he's joking. But what's the joke? Is it that people use "n.b." when there's no reason to pay any more note to the thing after the "n.b." than to anything else in the text? Or is it not a joke, and Wallace is giving the abbreviation the meaning it has genuinely acquired in use over the years, which is to designate an aside?

At this point, you might wonder whether Wallace is a prescriptivist or a descriptivist when it comes to word usage, and the cool thing about that is there's an essay in the "Consider the Lobster" essay collection* — it's not all about lobsters! — that has about a million things to say on that subject, but since it's not one of the essays in the audiobook — which is an abridgment — his resolution of that issue is not lodged in my brain. The essay is "Tense Present: Democracy, English, and the Wars over Usage." Key passage:

Garner's A Dictionary of Modern American Usage is thus both a collection of information and a piece of Democratic rhetoric.⁴⁹ Its goal is to recast the Prescriptivist's persona: The author presents himself as an authority not in an autocratic sense but in a technocratic sense. And the technocrat is not only a thoroughly modern and palatable image of Authority but also immune to the charges of elitism/classism that have hobbled traditional Prescriptivism.

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⁴⁹(meaning literally Democratic — it Wants Your Vote)

Thus, I take it, Wallace wasn't joking. He was seeking votes for assigning the meaning "by the way" to "n.b."

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*Even though I have the audiobook of "Consider the Lobster" and the paperback of the unabridged text, I bought the Kindle version just now so I could cut and paste text for blogging purposes. But when I made my first attempt at copying, I got a pop-up window — the first I've ever seen in a Kindle book — "Due to publisher restrictions, copy is not allowed for this title." That was pretty annoying. I found a few key words — hypereducated snoot egghead — Googled and found copyable text here. Feel free to read it free. N.b., it has 52 footnotes [at the free link; 124 footnotes in the Kindle text].