I honestly don't care about the name very much and immediately got the Alan Moore homage. But if someone were to ask me about the connotations that the word evoked in a neutral setting that is where my mind would go. Or I would think of how the women described me above.
Taking old and/or loaded words and stripping them of their class connotations is a noble goal but very hard. Sometimes impossible.
It is sort of related to when minorities reclaim old ethnic or prejudicial slurs. This practice always left me feeling weird at least in terms of Judaism. There is or was a Jewish magazine called "Heeb" and that always rubbed me the wrong way. Then again I never liked the reduction of Judaism to kitsch and I am far from the most religious person in the world. I am almost completely secular and if not atheist, at least a very apathetic agnostic.
I've had it debated whether I count as hipster or not. A lot of my tastes in music, reading , NPR shows, and movies often falls somewhere under the rubic of hipster. So do my preferences for craft brews served in bars with the iron, wood, and edison bulb aesthetic and my coffee snobbery.
However, I don't really dress the part. And can't pull off their version of "irony".
On a somewhat related note to answer your dreadlock question. If I was ever in a position to hire someone for office work, I would not mind if they had dreadlocks. I might mind dyed neon hair though.
You would be perfectly at home in Williamsburg* with that t-shirt.
*The section of Brooklyn that is known as one of the birth places of the Hipster along with the Mission in San Francisco. Not the city in Virginia. My NYC-SF brain works against most of the US. I usually just presume that when I talk about Williamsburg most people will know I am talking about Hipster-central. Experience teaches me that this is not true.
My issue with the term gentleman is that does have old-fashioned and class-based implications. When I think of the term gentleman, I think of men of leisure from Victorian and Edwardian England. I think of it as a term used to keep out outsiders from being part of high culture and society. "He might have money but he is not gentleman" meaning he has the money and works in the right field maybe he even attended university but his ancestry is humble and he did not attend Eton or Harrow. Or in the American case, Groton or Exeter.
I get visions of "seasons" "deubtante balls", old-fashioned holidays at New Port beach or the English countryside, etc.
In an ideal world, a gentleman can probably wear almost anything and still be a gentleman. The only exceptions being if the t-shirt was trying to be offensive or rude on purpose. There is nothing gentlemanly in shock jock humor/12 year old humor.
In reality, I think when people think of "dressing like a gentleman" they think of something more elegant and formal. Not necessarily a suit or tie all the time but something more than a t-shirt and shorts. A look that is unquestionable adult. The link I provided is Southern casual gentleman with a modern twist. Note of disclaimers, Billy Reid is one of my favorite designers.
The basic look found in the fashion pages of GQ or Esquire is also the basic look of s gentleman. You can look like a gentleman and wear jeans but never shorts. In the popular imagination, a gentleman embraces being an adult in all ways.
That is a good question. I think the term is largely anachronistic.
On another web forum that is largely comprised of women, I was unironically and sincerely described as a gentlemen by a few of the women. I think they meant that I was polite, did not act like a "bro/frat dude", they guessed that I observed personal space, etc.
In real life, I think I have a bit of a reputation for being a gentleman but no one has used the term directly. I was once called "Dinner Party fun" in a hopefully good way. There was another time when I was really tired and wanted to go home but was encouraged to go to another guy's apartment with two women. The encourager (who wasn't present at the apartment) told me she was really glad that I went. Later someone else told me that this was not for my own benefit but largely to prevent anything sketchy on the part of the other guy.
I would say being a gentleman is roughly equivalent to not being selfish or a douche and this includes being kind and considerate at the expense of your own sense of style and perhaps sometimes dignity. This might mean putting on a suit or something more than casual gear from time to time.
I think the best take on Niall Fergusson's article involves two factors. One is not related to the Professor and that is that Tina Brown has basically decided that the best way to revive Newsweek is by trolling. This is not completely her fault but the current nature of the beast in web publishing. I remember hearing that on-line journalism is no longer about getting people to read a whole issue but makes money via having one or two articles clicked on a lot and passed around the web. The best way to get clicks seems to be via contrarianism and being agent provocatuers. We say don't feed the trolls but it seems like umbrage provides some kind of narcotic high and people like being outraged and being able to write screeds in the comments about why the author of a post is simply wrong.
While responding to the professor is necessary it also adds fuel to the fire and I bet Tina Brown is not upset one bit about the controversy. Neither is Niall Fergusson probably.
The second part involves understand Niall's real target audience who are not fellow academics (everyone denouncing him does so while lauding his pre-hack work like his history of the Rothschilds), Newsweek readers, or the general public.
Ferguson seems to make most of his income from the speaker's circuit. According to what I've read, he resigned from Harvard Business School (but not Harvard itself) so he can do more speeches without having to do pesky things like teach classes. His article was really aimed at surprisingly eggshelled Masters of the Universe* who want to be patted on the head and given a cookie and are willing to pay top dollar to do so.
*I am very fascinated about how eggshelled many executive and Wall Street, and John Galt wannabe types are. They are wildly economically successful and still seem to basically wanted to be given milk and cookies and a kiss on the head from mommy. They have absolutely no concept of why people who are struggling or lost their jobs would be angry at them.
I am largely atheist (read: I call myself culturally, ethnically Jewish). I believe in evolution, climate change, and the general scientific consensus.
However, I am not a science person at all. My brain is arts and humanities oriented and now I am a newly minted lawyer. There is no consequence to my believing in evolution beyond not being mocked by certain people.
However, your friend was probably trying to cultivate a certain look for his bachelor party and thought your outfit was too casual. To be fair to your friend, I would do the same. Though my reaction is somewhat psychological and in rebellion from what I call the 40 going on 15 culture. There is something strange to me about seeing men who are well into middle age still trying to dress like hipsters or 15 year old skater punks.
Though next time you are in Nashville and need to dress like a gentlemen:
But the issue is that a lot of Republicans want to chuck evolution and replace it with Intelligent Design and/or Creationism. The teaching side-by-side is merely a stop-gap measure so they don't seem as extreme as they really are.
The Republican Party is a whole lot of mess to me. In an ideal world, I would be able to vote for an old liberal Republican like Jacob Javits. But there are no men or women like Jacob Javits in the Republican party anymore. Someone who is socially liberal, does not believe in dismantling the New Deal or Great Society but in keeping them solvent.
I agree that we all have our prejudices and these come from all sorts of areas.
My prejudices seem to come from growing up in a very specific geographic and cultural context in the United States.
I grew up in an upper-middle class professional suburb of New York. Half the town was like me and Jewish. Another quarter or so was Asian. The remaining Christians were almost exclusively Roman Catholic. There was no sort of Evangelical group. The majority of our parents had advanced degrees. The majority of my classmates (including myself) internalized that what you do in life is go to school, study hard, get into a good college or university, study hard some more, eventually go to some grad school, and then take your spot in the upper-middle class as a lawyer, doctor, engineer, lower level executive, etc. Most of us also came from typical immigrant success stories: the great-grandparents or grandparents were immigrants, our parents were the first generation to grow up in the suburbs, and we were very successfully integrated third-generation Americans.
So it was kind of a shock to me when I met people at college whose families have been here for hundreds of years (often since pre-Revolutionary days) and they were still the first person in their family to attend college. My immediate thought was "How can your family have lived here for 300 years without sending a soul to college until you?"
Since I have fully absorbed the values of my upbringing and class, I often clash with people who have rejected it and this clash can produce a bigoted thought or swipe. Luckily I have often (but not always) good at suppressing those thoughts and remarks.
One came with a woman who came from deep Southern working class stock. She proudly refered to herself as prole stock. She herself was quite educated, converted to Islam, and I think grew up in more middle class circumstances but she still saw herself as coming from a very hard scrabble Southern rural life. Needlessly to say, we clashed a lot and she saw me as being somewhat to very classist/aristocratic. She mentioned being especially proud of an uncle who was Ivy league educated for undergrad and law school but rejected it all and went to be career military. Sometimes when I got rather angry, there was a part of me that wanted to ask her why she was so proud of being from the American equivalent of a Cossack?
I also resented her swipe against the kind of education I received. My alma mater is not Ivy League but in a very close equivalent and certainly part of that Northeastern old school vanguard.
For all the talk about how everything is becoming bland and identical in the United States thanks to mass culture and the Internet, I still think that there are a lot of regional differences and these geographic breakdowns lead to suspicion and hostility. Like with the Southern woman and myself. She saw herself as being part of a long-tradition of Southern working class folks and I came from something completely different. I have no agricultural relatives. My great-grandparents were poor immigrants but in an urban setting. We have no common language and both assumed the values of our upbringings. She saw Ivy League as a thing to proudly reject. I see it as a thing to proudly embrace. My dad and uncle were Ivy League educated as undergrads. I grew up in a school district that sent a disproportionate amount of students to the Ivy League or equivalents and did so purposefully. It wasn't enough in my hometown to get into college/university because our parents had already done that. You needed to get into one of a certain caliber.
I did not attend for that implication to be there. Nor do I think it will happen soon or possibly at anytime.
The general spirit of bipartisanship that existed during the mid-20th century was probably an exception over a rule. The current strident partisanship is probably a return to old form.
What I should also say is that I love books as an actual object. I love the way they feel in my hands, cover art, ownership (I don't think you really quite own something when it is only in electronic form), the way they fill a room, etc.
I know a few people who have gone completely digital and see me as being an enemy to the environment (semi-seriously). I don't like the idea of future generations not knowing what an actual book is and thinking of bookshelves as unnecessary.
I read the league on and off for a while before deciding to start posting.
One of the things I learned in my observation is to reply to TVD as a little as possible.
I have a lot of disagreements with James but he is intelligent, polite, civil, and intellectually honest. He is fun to debate with. TVD simply goes for jeering extremism and partisanship. Luckily I think that there are more people like James on the League than like TVD.
There was an interesting essay I read about young, white people in their 20s on food stamps because of the Great Recession.
The author was a writer and part-time waitress in New York. Most of her friends were also well-educated but sparsely employed creative/artist types. The essay was about how people guilt tripped her for being white, young, educated, and on food stamps. The attackers seem to think the author of the essay should be able to get an office job easily because of her education and race.
On “A Few Words on Bigotry”
Kazzy,
Did NYC finally get a good modern rock station?
I mourned the death of WLIR/WDRE.
"
Kazzy,
Not owning an iPod might make you more hipster than you realize.
"
I have both his albums and pronounce it the second way.
"
James,
Those are good points.
I honestly don't care about the name very much and immediately got the Alan Moore homage. But if someone were to ask me about the connotations that the word evoked in a neutral setting that is where my mind would go. Or I would think of how the women described me above.
Taking old and/or loaded words and stripping them of their class connotations is a noble goal but very hard. Sometimes impossible.
It is sort of related to when minorities reclaim old ethnic or prejudicial slurs. This practice always left me feeling weird at least in terms of Judaism. There is or was a Jewish magazine called "Heeb" and that always rubbed me the wrong way. Then again I never liked the reduction of Judaism to kitsch and I am far from the most religious person in the world. I am almost completely secular and if not atheist, at least a very apathetic agnostic.
"
I've had it debated whether I count as hipster or not. A lot of my tastes in music, reading , NPR shows, and movies often falls somewhere under the rubic of hipster. So do my preferences for craft brews served in bars with the iron, wood, and edison bulb aesthetic and my coffee snobbery.
However, I don't really dress the part. And can't pull off their version of "irony".
On a somewhat related note to answer your dreadlock question. If I was ever in a position to hire someone for office work, I would not mind if they had dreadlocks. I might mind dyed neon hair though.
"
That is a bit too formal/Victorian for me. Plus I don't like high collars very much or feeling constrained.
I prefer a more modern look with some bohemia thrown in for my former theater days like:
http://www.billyreid.com/product/wesley-brown.html
http://www.parkandbond.com/product/132611876
Interestingly in some ways my tastes are more modern and also more conservative.
"
A t-shirt with Tom Selleck? Are you s hipster?
You would be perfectly at home in Williamsburg* with that t-shirt.
*The section of Brooklyn that is known as one of the birth places of the Hipster along with the Mission in San Francisco. Not the city in Virginia. My NYC-SF brain works against most of the US. I usually just presume that when I talk about Williamsburg most people will know I am talking about Hipster-central. Experience teaches me that this is not true.
"
I guess millage my vary.
My issue with the term gentleman is that does have old-fashioned and class-based implications. When I think of the term gentleman, I think of men of leisure from Victorian and Edwardian England. I think of it as a term used to keep out outsiders from being part of high culture and society. "He might have money but he is not gentleman" meaning he has the money and works in the right field maybe he even attended university but his ancestry is humble and he did not attend Eton or Harrow. Or in the American case, Groton or Exeter.
I get visions of "seasons" "deubtante balls", old-fashioned holidays at New Port beach or the English countryside, etc.
"
No one in this community is ordinary probably. Ordinary people do not write long blog posts on politics.
"
I just want to say hello to a fellow Dale.
There are not many of us around.
"
In an ideal world, a gentleman can probably wear almost anything and still be a gentleman. The only exceptions being if the t-shirt was trying to be offensive or rude on purpose. There is nothing gentlemanly in shock jock humor/12 year old humor.
In reality, I think when people think of "dressing like a gentleman" they think of something more elegant and formal. Not necessarily a suit or tie all the time but something more than a t-shirt and shorts. A look that is unquestionable adult. The link I provided is Southern casual gentleman with a modern twist. Note of disclaimers, Billy Reid is one of my favorite designers.
The basic look found in the fashion pages of GQ or Esquire is also the basic look of s gentleman. You can look like a gentleman and wear jeans but never shorts. In the popular imagination, a gentleman embraces being an adult in all ways.
"
That is a good question. I think the term is largely anachronistic.
On another web forum that is largely comprised of women, I was unironically and sincerely described as a gentlemen by a few of the women. I think they meant that I was polite, did not act like a "bro/frat dude", they guessed that I observed personal space, etc.
In real life, I think I have a bit of a reputation for being a gentleman but no one has used the term directly. I was once called "Dinner Party fun" in a hopefully good way. There was another time when I was really tired and wanted to go home but was encouraged to go to another guy's apartment with two women. The encourager (who wasn't present at the apartment) told me she was really glad that I went. Later someone else told me that this was not for my own benefit but largely to prevent anything sketchy on the part of the other guy.
I would say being a gentleman is roughly equivalent to not being selfish or a douche and this includes being kind and considerate at the expense of your own sense of style and perhaps sometimes dignity. This might mean putting on a suit or something more than casual gear from time to time.
On “In Which I Dissect One Harvard Professor’s Tabloid Cover Story (…At Length)”
I think the best take on Niall Fergusson's article involves two factors. One is not related to the Professor and that is that Tina Brown has basically decided that the best way to revive Newsweek is by trolling. This is not completely her fault but the current nature of the beast in web publishing. I remember hearing that on-line journalism is no longer about getting people to read a whole issue but makes money via having one or two articles clicked on a lot and passed around the web. The best way to get clicks seems to be via contrarianism and being agent provocatuers. We say don't feed the trolls but it seems like umbrage provides some kind of narcotic high and people like being outraged and being able to write screeds in the comments about why the author of a post is simply wrong.
While responding to the professor is necessary it also adds fuel to the fire and I bet Tina Brown is not upset one bit about the controversy. Neither is Niall Fergusson probably.
The second part involves understand Niall's real target audience who are not fellow academics (everyone denouncing him does so while lauding his pre-hack work like his history of the Rothschilds), Newsweek readers, or the general public.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/culture/niall-ferguson-newsweek-cover-11914269
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/08/dishonesty-is-the-seventh-killer-app/261352/
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/the-age-of-niallism-ferguson-and-the-post-fact-world/261395/
Ferguson seems to make most of his income from the speaker's circuit. According to what I've read, he resigned from Harvard Business School (but not Harvard itself) so he can do more speeches without having to do pesky things like teach classes. His article was really aimed at surprisingly eggshelled Masters of the Universe* who want to be patted on the head and given a cookie and are willing to pay top dollar to do so.
*I am very fascinated about how eggshelled many executive and Wall Street, and John Galt wannabe types are. They are wildly economically successful and still seem to basically wanted to be given milk and cookies and a kiss on the head from mommy. They have absolutely no concept of why people who are struggling or lost their jobs would be angry at them.
On “A Few Words on Bigotry”
This is a good point.
I am largely atheist (read: I call myself culturally, ethnically Jewish). I believe in evolution, climate change, and the general scientific consensus.
However, I am not a science person at all. My brain is arts and humanities oriented and now I am a newly minted lawyer. There is no consequence to my believing in evolution beyond not being mocked by certain people.
"
Atypical beard?
To answer your question, probably nothing.
However, your friend was probably trying to cultivate a certain look for his bachelor party and thought your outfit was too casual. To be fair to your friend, I would do the same. Though my reaction is somewhat psychological and in rebellion from what I call the 40 going on 15 culture. There is something strange to me about seeing men who are well into middle age still trying to dress like hipsters or 15 year old skater punks.
Though next time you are in Nashville and need to dress like a gentlemen:
http://www.billyreid.com/
"
But the issue is that a lot of Republicans want to chuck evolution and replace it with Intelligent Design and/or Creationism. The teaching side-by-side is merely a stop-gap measure so they don't seem as extreme as they really are.
The Republican Party is a whole lot of mess to me. In an ideal world, I would be able to vote for an old liberal Republican like Jacob Javits. But there are no men or women like Jacob Javits in the Republican party anymore. Someone who is socially liberal, does not believe in dismantling the New Deal or Great Society but in keeping them solvent.
"
This is a very good post.
I agree that we all have our prejudices and these come from all sorts of areas.
My prejudices seem to come from growing up in a very specific geographic and cultural context in the United States.
I grew up in an upper-middle class professional suburb of New York. Half the town was like me and Jewish. Another quarter or so was Asian. The remaining Christians were almost exclusively Roman Catholic. There was no sort of Evangelical group. The majority of our parents had advanced degrees. The majority of my classmates (including myself) internalized that what you do in life is go to school, study hard, get into a good college or university, study hard some more, eventually go to some grad school, and then take your spot in the upper-middle class as a lawyer, doctor, engineer, lower level executive, etc. Most of us also came from typical immigrant success stories: the great-grandparents or grandparents were immigrants, our parents were the first generation to grow up in the suburbs, and we were very successfully integrated third-generation Americans.
So it was kind of a shock to me when I met people at college whose families have been here for hundreds of years (often since pre-Revolutionary days) and they were still the first person in their family to attend college. My immediate thought was "How can your family have lived here for 300 years without sending a soul to college until you?"
Since I have fully absorbed the values of my upbringing and class, I often clash with people who have rejected it and this clash can produce a bigoted thought or swipe. Luckily I have often (but not always) good at suppressing those thoughts and remarks.
One came with a woman who came from deep Southern working class stock. She proudly refered to herself as prole stock. She herself was quite educated, converted to Islam, and I think grew up in more middle class circumstances but she still saw herself as coming from a very hard scrabble Southern rural life. Needlessly to say, we clashed a lot and she saw me as being somewhat to very classist/aristocratic. She mentioned being especially proud of an uncle who was Ivy league educated for undergrad and law school but rejected it all and went to be career military. Sometimes when I got rather angry, there was a part of me that wanted to ask her why she was so proud of being from the American equivalent of a Cossack?
I also resented her swipe against the kind of education I received. My alma mater is not Ivy League but in a very close equivalent and certainly part of that Northeastern old school vanguard.
For all the talk about how everything is becoming bland and identical in the United States thanks to mass culture and the Internet, I still think that there are a lot of regional differences and these geographic breakdowns lead to suspicion and hostility. Like with the Southern woman and myself. She saw herself as being part of a long-tradition of Southern working class folks and I came from something completely different. I have no agricultural relatives. My great-grandparents were poor immigrants but in an urban setting. We have no common language and both assumed the values of our upbringings. She saw Ivy League as a thing to proudly reject. I see it as a thing to proudly embrace. My dad and uncle were Ivy League educated as undergrads. I grew up in a school district that sent a disproportionate amount of students to the Ivy League or equivalents and did so purposefully. It wasn't enough in my hometown to get into college/university because our parents had already done that. You needed to get into one of a certain caliber.
On “My Pick for Essay of the Year.”
I did not attend for that implication to be there. Nor do I think it will happen soon or possibly at anytime.
The general spirit of bipartisanship that existed during the mid-20th century was probably an exception over a rule. The current strident partisanship is probably a return to old form.
On “Reading in the Digital Age”
What I should also say is that I love books as an actual object. I love the way they feel in my hands, cover art, ownership (I don't think you really quite own something when it is only in electronic form), the way they fill a room, etc.
I know a few people who have gone completely digital and see me as being an enemy to the environment (semi-seriously). I don't like the idea of future generations not knowing what an actual book is and thinking of bookshelves as unnecessary.
So I am a bit of a luddite this way.
On “My Pick for Essay of the Year.”
I've wanted to know the same thing. It has been bugging me more than it should since I started posting.
"
Very good point in your last sentence.
I don't always follow my own advice for the sake of honesty. Sometimes I get angry enough and respond to bait.
On “Reading in the Digital Age”
My solution during law school was to keep all my work at school and just stay in the library until finished.
This kept my apartment as a largely school-work free zone.
I will add that my apartment was a very easy walk to school.
"
My friend solved this problem by always doing pleasure reading with a beer near by
:)
On “My Pick for Essay of the Year.”
I read the league on and off for a while before deciding to start posting.
One of the things I learned in my observation is to reply to TVD as a little as possible.
I have a lot of disagreements with James but he is intelligent, polite, civil, and intellectually honest. He is fun to debate with. TVD simply goes for jeering extremism and partisanship. Luckily I think that there are more people like James on the League than like TVD.
"
There was an interesting essay I read about young, white people in their 20s on food stamps because of the Great Recession.
The author was a writer and part-time waitress in New York. Most of her friends were also well-educated but sparsely employed creative/artist types. The essay was about how people guilt tripped her for being white, young, educated, and on food stamps. The attackers seem to think the author of the essay should be able to get an office job easily because of her education and race.
http://thebillfold.com/2012/05/young-privileged-and-applying-for-food-stamps/
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.