WEIGHTISM: (n.) 1) Discrimination against overweight people, especially in the workplace. 2) Discrimination against not really overweight people if someone thinner and cuter is in the room. Origin: America, circa 1991, during the season opener of sitcom Mad About You. All Helen Hunt's fault.

Hold on. Too much, too fast. Back up a second. There are some themes and facts first, or the whole Helen Hunt thing won't make any sense:

Marketing to women is all trickle-down. It's the Reaganomics of the thong set. If 40-year-old women are supposed to look like they're in their 20s, then what the hell is a 20-year-old supposed to look like?

Size zero.

Twenty years ago there was no size zero. Twenty-five years ago there was barely a size 2, and if someone fit in a 2 she was usually what my mother called, in a whisper, "one of those girls with problems." Anorexia and bulimia were just getting popular then among the teenage set. The goal of weight obsessed teens and 20somethings was to fit in a size 4. It was a badge of honor to say you wore a 4. That was bad enough.

Now the badge of honor is to be size zero. How can it sound right to brag about being nothing?

It seems we've gone back 400 years in our evolution. In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, the nothing referred to was the essence of women, our genitalia. So what's changed? Then we had the royal court broadcasting our being null and void, and today we have CNN.

CNN now does segments on how personal appearance affects your status in the workplace. You're not supposed to be fat, or short, for that matter, but the combination of the two is the worst. Apparently you have to be eye level, and not wider than people's eyeglasses, for someone in management to see your brain.

Digital cameras don't help. The moment we could see ourselves instantly on digital cameras, our extreme nature was let loose. Now we click a shot, take a look, erase, and do it over without even waiting an hour at Moto Photo. When we used to pick up photos at Moto Photo, we picked the best one there was in the roll. And we felt okay. Now there's no roll. We do it over and over and over and over. We're little foundlings with no boundaries.

With infinite possibilities, we want better, even if the subject is the same. It seems plausible that there may be one angle, one glimpse of the ideal us, the us that is fleeting but definitely there. Just keep clicking.

Digital cameras illustrate the symptoms. But they don't explain the source. That would be a cheap answer. So how did size zero happen? It was before we all had digital cameras. The cataclysmic event was....

Helen Hunt, in the sitcom Mad About You.

First season: It's an instant hit because it's funny, it's so New York, we all relate, they're both so cute.