Kenneth G. Wilson (1923–). The Columbia Guide to Standard American English. 1993.
modern, modernistic (adjs.)
Modern means “of the present or very recent time,” “current,” “up to date,” as in They lived in a modern house. Modernistic means “associated with modernism,” but its more frequent meaning is “contemporary” and especially “trendy,” in what is often a pejorative sense stressing the imitative or affectedly “new” in design and execution: This modern painting has the integrity that modernistic paintings nearly always lack.
