ditz

Like ditz, Barbie has long been shorthand for a woman who focuses on her looks to the exclusion of all else.

Gilda Radner, a comic on “Saturday Night Live,” invented a new caricature: Baba Wawa, a funny-talking ditz.

This time the ditz is Muriel Tate, a New Jersey woman who comes to the Plaza to see, for the first time in nearly 17 years, her high school boyfriend, Jesse Kiplinger.

But the update of Hilary from a proud ditz to an earnest and hypercompetent cook and commentator attuned to racism in the food world also exemplifies the reboot’s superficial and tiresome bids for social relevance.

My brother-in-law taught his children to call my husband “Uncle Ditz” when they started to talk, and now at ages 9 and 11, they call him “Ditzy.”