That weird daytime word has jumped decisively to other realms of the arts and entertainment, like an interspecies contagion. In 2004, the critic Virginia Heffernan called “relatable” “a weird daytime word” and characterized it thus: “I thought the stock way daytime people become ‘relatable’ is by being older than starlets, with wider hips. “It’s the stories about living your life that makes you relatable to your audience,” she said.

When Rosie O’Donnell launched her TV talk show in 1996, she said that she hoped to preserve time with her family. The contemporary meaning of “relatable”-to describe a character or a situation in which an ordinary person might see himself reflected-first was popularized by the television industry.

As recently as a decade ago, even as “relatable” began to accrue its current meaning, the word remained uncommon.

Whence comes relatability? A hundred years ago, if someone said something was “relatable,” she meant that it could be told-the Shakespearean sense of “relate”-or that it could be connected to some other thing. What was remarkable about Glass’s tweet wasn’t so much his judgment of Shakespeare’s merit but the fact that the Bard of Public Radio expressed himself like a resentful millennial filling out a teacher evaluation.

Perhaps that’s no surprise, because relatability-a logism so neo that it’s not even recognized by the 2008 iteration of Microsoft Word with which these words are being written-has become widely and unthinkingly accepted as a criterion of value, even by people who might be expected to have more sophisticated critical tools at their disposal. The suckiness or otherwise of Shakespeare is a topic that cannot be broached without generating considerable online outrage, and Glass later backtracked, telling Entertainment Weekly that his provocative comment was “kind of an off-the-cuff thing to say that in the cold light of day, I’m not sure I can defend at all.” What Glass didn’t rescind, though, was the yardstick by which he was judging the merit of Shakespeare’s work: whether the plays are “relatable.” Later, he tweeted that the productions of “Richard III” and “Twelfth Night” in which he had seen Mark Rylance perform last winter had affected him similarly: “fantastic acting, surprisingly funny, but Shakespeare is not relatable, unemotional.” If Twitter is a place in which a user may be rewarded for exposing his most stupid self, Ira Glass put the medium to good use this week, when, after watching John Lithgow appear as King Lear at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, he tweeted his response: “Shakespeare sucks.” Glass admired Lithgow’s performance but thought the play flawed.

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