rolled off the cultural tongue like a principled anecdote

[chopin7]

Hello
It's the movie "Vox Lux".
Right at the beginning, some narrator goes on like this,
"Considering her parents' background, education, and socioeconomic status,
being somewhat on the losing side of Reaganomics,
the name of Latin origin seemed an especially poetic choice.
It carved her out some predetermined destination, a route which to travel by.
And many years before "Celeste" rolled off the cultural tongue like a principled anecdote one
senses they were born knowing, she might not have been described as all that special
or conspicuously talented."


The last one seems a bit too elaborated.
Is he saying simply "before she became famous".
"Principled anecdote" strikes me particularly as superfluous.
Anyway, any idea?

Thank you

 

[owlman5]

Hello, chopin7. I agree with your interpretation of what that line means. It looks like an unusually florid way of saying "before she became famous".

 

[chopin7]

Thank you, Owlman!

 

[PaulQ]

Anyway, any idea?

Yes, but you have to give the plot as context.
Vox Lux - Wikipedia

Teenage sisters Celeste [...] and Eleanor "Ellie" Montgomery [...] survive a school shooting in 1999, and are catapulted into stardom after writing and performing a song about their experience. The film traces Celeste's career as she draws the attention of a passionate manager (Jude Law) and rises to worldwide fame. In 2017, the now-31-year-old Celeste (Natalie Portman) is mother to a teenage daughter of her own (Cassidy) and is preparing for a massive concert while dealing with the media fallout of a terrorist attack using her own iconography.

And many years before "Celeste" rolled off the cultural tongue like a principled anecdote ([that] one senses they were born knowing,)

And many years before she wrote and performed the song and before the time when people mentioned the name "Celeste" in the story of the school attack…

The implication is that the song became a success and thus people would associate the song and Celeste whenever a mass-shooting was in the news.

 

[chopin7]

Thank you, Paul, for your explanation.