Drama and Dirt

I’ve always seen movies or TV shows that carry the tag “soap” under their genres. And for years, I never really understood what it meant. I’d scroll past it and never once did I feel the urgency to find out its meaning. It’s funny how some words just sit in the corners of our curiosity, waiting for the day we decide to notice them.

Today’s freewriting prompt was “soap,” and it took me almost an hour to put my first word down. I know what soap means, the one that lathers and washes off dirt, but I wanted to dig deeper than what most of us know the word to be. Maybe the word itself nudged me or maybe I was just procrastinating less today.

Either way, I finally looked it up. And now I know.
“Soap,” as it appears in movies or TV shows, comes from soap opera, a term that originated because early serialized dramas were sponsored by soap companies. Imagine that. Companies that made detergents, powders and cleaning products were once the backbone of dramatic television storytelling. The irony isn’t lost on me, drama and dirt, both being washed clean by soap.

But it made me wonder if people still call them soap operas for that same reason? Or has the name grown beyond its origin, becoming something cultural, something nostalgic? Well, I can only guess that it’s no longer about soap but about the kind of storytelling that sticks to a person, melodramatic, stretched, emotional, sometimes chaotic, but at least, it’s always entertaining.

What’s fun here is how a writing prompt could make you finally learn something you’ve seen for years but kinda avoided. Something that’s always been right there, blinking on your screen, but you never cared to question. Now, if someone asks me what soap means in a movie tag, I’ll answer without hesitation. And I’ll probably tell them this whole story too, because that’s just how learning feels, a little revelation tucked inside an ordinary word.

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