3. He wore the same shirt as he had been wearing in the class photo the year before.
I don't get it. Had he outgrown it or something?
No kid needed to be in both the class photo and the individual photo, so I was in everyone else's class photo, but not in my own.
This, on the other hand, is fantastic.
Nah, I think the idea is that kids noticed that he had the same shirt two years and teased him. Possibly it was too small and ratty looking, he being an absent-minded type.
Presumably the cameraman didn't show up so everyone had to take turns taking the group photograph.
Was it a particularly distinctive shirt? Because everyone in my school photo was wearing the same kind of shirt.
I don't think they had school uniforms, no.
I had really stupid glasses in all my class pictures because in 1977 they only made one style of frames for kids. Sometimes, the frames were broken and wired back together.
Surely if they had had uniforms wearing the same shirt two years in a row wouldn't have been an issue.
I assumed the implication was that it made him look inbred and impoverished. Which was how most of my school pics of that era made me look, so I can sympathize.
I really need to get my parents to scan in the picture my dad took 5 minutes after a bee that had been hiding in a grape juice pitcher stung me on the lip. I'll put it on the flickr if and when they do. Man that was painful and humiliating! Swelling was down to barely-perceptible by the next morning though.
Surely if they had had uniforms wearing the same shirt two years in a row wouldn't have been an issue.
Hence my confusion.
9 I had those same stupid frames.
I had really stupid glasses in all my class pictures because in 1977 they only made one style of frames for kids.
Better living through capitalism!
A couple of weeks ago I got a haircut and gave my usual warning that if may hair is too short, it will stick up. I don't actually care that much if my hair sticks up just a bit because hair grows and it will stay down soon enough. The warning is just an easy way to say short, but not too short, while sounding slightly less vague than that.
This time, though, the haircutter cut it too short and then decided to "solve" the problem by cutting even shorter. The immediate effect was ok because my hair was short enough that none of it looked like it was standing up disproportionately. But now it's long enough to look pretty horrible and I really need to renew my passport, but I don't want a photo like this.
Can you make it lie down with some kind of product? It only has to look reasonable in a still.
Tuck your lower lip up and over your hair?
16: Probably, but I generally hate using hair product. I'd probably do it if I had an interview or something like that, though. Not washing my hair as often helps keep it down, and in a week or two it'll probably be fine, so my current strategy is to wait and politely pretend to not notice when people stare at the top of my head.
(Three "probably"s. That's a lot even for me.)
I don't like calling hair fixatives "product." That's really fucking with the English language so far as turning a very general word useful in a great many contexts and using it for alarmingly specific purposes.
That sounds like just one of those things, Mobes.
For my second-grade school photo, I made the Saddest Face Ever. My father kept the picture at his desk, and he said whenever he was feeling down he would look at it and console himself with the knowledge that, at least, wasn't as utterly miserable as his son.
Please scan the photo in and upload it.
23: Please insert a "he" in the appropriate place in the last clause.
24: I wish I had it. I wonder if my mother does.
20 It must be a bit in some movie or a skit I once saw but I find calling hair fixatives and the like "product" to be funny. Maybe I'm just easily amused.
I don't like calling hair fixatives "product." That's really fucking with the English language so far as turning a very general word useful in a great many contexts and using it for alarmingly specific purposes.
I had the same response when told that to fix the hole in the wall I had to buy a container of "Compound". "Just go to the hardware store and ask for Compound, they'll know what you mean." Apparently it's actually called "joint compound".
That is a spectacular bit of reasoning, Heebs.
My eighth grade photo was so badly lit, and I was in such an awkward phase, that photo was so bad that when my mother made one of those photo collages for high school graduation, she left out the eighth grade school picture.
Apparently it's actually called "joint compound".
There's quite a few cases where the real name for a familiar construction product isn't the common name - "caulk" is sealant, "spackle" is joint compound, and sidewalks are made of concrete, not cement (cement is an ingredient of concrete). All of the common terms apply to real things, but they're not used right (you caulk an open joint before painting, but you use sealant around an exterior opening - it's mostly a matter of whether the product is supposed to have integrity).
"Our Cala was so smart she skipped eighth grade!"
I have had that response to "joint compound" and to "machine oil". It made me want to start a list!
It's an interesting phenomenon, sort of the opposite of the more common shift known as "semantic bleaching" (where an originally specific term comes to be used in a more general sense). I don't know of a term for it in wide use, but "semantic dyeing" would be logical.
In the ninth grade or sometime thereabouts there was a girl in my class who, on the day the yearbook photos were taken, happened to wear a blouse that was very similar in tonality to the background against which the photos were taken. This might not have been problem had the yearbook been printed in color, but in black and white her photo perfectly created the illusion that her smiling, disembodied head was floating in a milk-white void.
where an originally specific term comes to be used in a more general sense
Actually, I think that is what's going on, at least sometimes. Another example I had in mind illustrates it well: there are many and various prying and demolishing tools, most of which are commonly called crowbars. But a crowbar is one specific type, while others include flatbars, pry bars, cat's paws, and, yes, wrecking bars. Anyone in construction would know exactly what's meant by any of those, but you'd do better asking a layman for "that crowbar over there - the flat one" or whatever.
OTOH, at least some of the time it's the industry retconning specificity - I strongly suspect that caulk is the original term, and applied to all gunnable compounds, but, as material technology advanced and things deserving their own names developed, the term "gunnable sealant" was applied to them, while generic tubes of acrylic stayed "caulk."
In the eighth grade there was a boy who was Chinese-American who I had been friends with in elementary school (going over his house to play and all) but we had grown apart as these things happen. Nice kid. His last name was Chin. When the yearbook came out it had "Chink" instead of "Chin." The weird thing is I don't remember this at the time, but a few years ago I came across it and when I saw that I was horrified. Both at the racist misspelling which could only have been deliberate and at the fact that I still possessed it and therefore it never occurred to the administration of the school to insist on recalling all of the yearbooks and reissuing them. He must have been mortified.
39: Yeah, the crowbar thing sounds like an example of semantic bleaching, but I think what other people were talking about were examples of the opposite process. You seem to be talking about a sort of musical-chairs of technical terms, which may include both processes of semantic change.
"caulk" is sealant,
WHAT'S MOLE?
I thought hair "product" was a way of describing things that may be gels, may be sprays, or may be I don't know what because I don't use any of it. Or maybe it's all gel? I remember "gel" being the term when I was a kid.
and therefore it never occurred to the administration of the school to insist on recalling all of the yearbooks and reissuing them.
It would never have occurred to anyone to do so.
What is the "bleaching" term that makes me think that "semantic bleaching" is somehow dirty sounding? Is "vaginal bleaching" something we've discussed here? Am I going insane?
If you'd have gone in and asked for vaginal bleaching, the receptionist probably would have guessed anyway.
44 Why not? Even now? I wonder what would have happened if it had been another ethnic slur, say, one considered even more abhorrent.
I've never heard of recalling a high school yearbook. I suppose it might be done in high-tier private schools, but otherwise, there would be no budget for it, I imagine.
I suppose it might be done in high-tier private schools
Anal bleaching? Most definitely.
Our yearbook wasn't recalled for having two pictures of a guy* with his shirttail sticking out of his fly.
* same guy, not me.
This was a public school. An American public school.
Shirttail not quite the same as a penis.
I'm not hung up on the recall, but it was shocking to see and even more shocking to realize that it wasn't considered scandalous back then or I'd have remembered it at the time.
I believe yearbooks are funded mostly or entirely by students' preorders.
Ours was funded by student preorders and polite begging from local businesses. I had to do the ad pages in the back. That's why I put the shirttail pictures in.
Shirttail not quite the same as a penis.
Or so the mullahs would have you believe.
See, Moby was apparently on the yearbook committee (about which I will say nothing), so he might know who could be blamed for the error in Barry's yearbook. The printer? The yearbook committee itself? Who pays for the reissue?
I've never heard of recalling a high school yearbook.
I was also editor of the newspaper (small school). I put in a picture of the senior and junior classes on a bus (did I mention it was a small school) giving the finger to the camera. That made it past the adviser and the principal (who I am now Facebook friends with) before the printer caught it. I didn't get in much trouble, I think because the school officials missed it also.
When I was in high school I tried to put up flyers all over the school that said "CANADIANS ARE REALLY DUMB" but they made me stop because it was offensive.
Anyway, spelling the name wrong is the yearbook committee's fault but they certainly don't have money enough to reprint.
Well yeah. On the other hand, we really put some thought into coming up with the least plausible nationality to be randomly prejudiced against.
Also it was an ad for our literary magazine.
So really, wheels within wheels here.
We didn't have an literary magazine.
We had a couple. The one I edited was the jerky one for sarcastic losers, basically.
Yearbook committee kids are mini Napoleons, I tell you what.
It sucks, Barry, about your friend's name.
67.1: I personally used it for nepotism. I even put my grandma's photo in.
60: Once, when I was a child, I reproached my mother. My own mother!
Reading this while waiting for a plane reminded me of a totally illogical thing my brother and I used to do. Every winter we would fly as unaccompanied minors to visit grandparents in FL. We knew that cabin pressurization made our ears hurt, and for some reason we thought that pressurization was applied through the little fans above each seat. So, since unaccompanied minors get to board first, we used to run up and down the aisles closing every single vent, thinking that if we were successful the plane wouldn't be pressurized and our ears wouldn't hurt.
This is back when there was a smoking and non-smoking section of the cabin (often without any physical divider, just indicated by row number) so stupidity was pretty common back then.
A couple months ago I was captured in a picture at a corporate luau making the hook-em horns sign instead of the Shaka sign. My knowledge of finger gestures is limited.
That's okay, SP. I'm just going to marvel at "corporate luau" for a while.
60, 63: Maybe the school remembered these days.
72: The pig is given class B shares (non-voting), otherwise it's the same.
Actually, it's a lot like an incorporeal luau, just with more embodiment.
In my 5th or 6th grade class picture a couple of us were seated cross-legged on the ground in front (class too big for the risers I think). This led to my white socks* (nicely framed by dorky leather shoes--before we could wear gym shoes/sneakers in class--and high-water pants) being about the most prominent feature in the whole photograph. Not a glad day when the pictures came back.
*Which were at the time routinely stigmatized as 'Parma' socks in an unsubtle dig at a certain eastern European ethnic group.
*Which were at the time routinely stigmatized as 'Parma' socks in an unsubtle dig at a certain eastern European ethnic group.
Subtle enough to be lost on me. Italians?
77: Parmalats, the fiscally imprudent dairymen of Eastern Europe, characterized by their white socks and preference for lower-case Helvetica type.
Polish. Although Parma was also stand-in for ethnic working class white suburban culture in general.
80: That article is like a glimpse into an America I had no idea existed.
I can't even figure out what country that is.
"the wildly popular Ghoulardi show" is a clue to the fact that it's all an elaborate code used by a secret society to plot its nefarious machinations.
Ah, you mean unsubtle to people who frequently watched the "Ghoulardi" show on local Cleveland TV 40 years ago.
I was also editor of the newspaper (small school). I put in a picture of the senior and junior classes on a bus (did I mention it was a small school) giving the finger to the camera. That made it past the adviser and the principal (who I am now Facebook friends with) before the printer caught it. I didn't get in much trouble, I think because the school officials missed it also.
On one of the "candids" pages my high school yearbook had a picture of some cheerleader types (the school had no actual cheerleaders) standing in a row, with a caption saying "A wind tunnel?". None of the (two) adults involved in publishing it noticed.
86: oh, I get it, 'cuz Parma.
Is it "use references that completely evade Sifu" night on unfogged, or something?
Yes, I went very local there I guess. Also a long time ago. Ernie Anderson who started the Parma shtick as "Ghoulardi" is the father of Paul Thomas Anderson (Boogie Nights is dedicated to Ernie who had just died). You'd recognize Anderson's voice as he ended up mostly doing voice work, "famous" for his enunciation of "The Love Boat".
84: It became general slang in NE Ohio beyond just the watchers of the TV show and lived on for many years after. I actually thought it might have escaped into the wild, but no entry in the urban dictionary. I'd be interested if RHC's students today would get the reference. I'd ask him to ask except for the fieldwork ban.
81: I'm moderately interested in what struck you as most surprising or alien?
93: I can't speak for Teo of course, but for myself, the idea that there was this show, that was like a standard Count Floyd-esque late nite horror movie screening deal, but that it had some kind of sketch comedy aspect that made fun of local ethnic groups in a sort of Honeymooners mode, that was very strange. Also that this is still big enough news that a sort of belated reconciliation between one of the actors and some of the local solons is treated with such reverence. Very American Splendor all around.
93: More or less what 94 says. The structure of the article is of a very conventional type of story, but I had never heard of any of the specific people, places, and ethnic stereotypes involved.
Remember when you mentioned that driving the roads around Shiprock was the experience you had had that was most alien to what you considered normal? Reading that article was sort of like that for me.
Further to 95.1, it isn't just that the specific names were unfamiliar, but that the whole thing was treated as this big deal that everyone reading the article was assumed to already be familiar with. Again, like 94 says.
I mean, they were so pissed off about the white socks jokes that they forced the cancellation of the show? That's, um, wow.
I always knew this would happen. Stupid eastern european ethnic groups.
I think I saw that show (or its successor) when I was at DFH College. I can't recall anything about Parma.
(So the nation called it a Full Cleveland, but in Cleveland it was a Full Parma?)
I was editor of my literary magazine, too! Wonder twin powers, activate: form of....horrible poetry!
Every year, the teacher who sponsored the literary magazine would magically pick the class homosexual to edit. It was sort of sweet.
So the nation called it a Full Cleveland, but in Cleveland it was a Full Parma?
Hm, so Parma:Cleveland::Cleveland:America? That would make at least some of this stuff more comprehensible, although the white socks are still a mystery.
Easily the most awesome girl in my class (a friend, but not a girlfriend, although I would have walked through fire) wore a Comic Relief red nose in the sixth form class photo.
And they had the photo retouched to edit her out, like one of those Soviet politicians who disappeared and was edited out of the official photos.
It was a "no, I'm really not staying here" moment.
I mean, what kind of mean-spirited Tory bullshit was that again?
The OP story (about the friend) sounds like self-serving BS. Probably the kid was weird looking and later made up a story that painted him in a better light.
As a weird-looking person, myself, I can sympathize with that tactic.
The OP story (about the friend) sounds like self-serving BS. Probably the kid was weird looking and later made up a story that painted him in a better light.
As a weird-looking person, myself, I can sympathize with that tactic.
I'm too normal looking to have sympathy.
I dunno, the thing about pulling up your lower lip strikes me as typical kid thinking.
Joey was unsure if he liked the shirt he was wearing today. It had flames on the sleeves and a car on the front, on the left side of the chest. He liked the flames, but didn't like the car. His solution--wear the shirt backwards!
The OP story (about the friend) sounds like self-serving BS. Probably the kid was weird looking and later made up a story that painted him in a better light.
He might have been a weird-looking kid, but he's a thoughtful, grounded adult, so it would be very out of character for him to spontaneously tell me an invented story about a photo I've never seen.
I did something very similar - decided the night before my class photo that my hair was too long and cut it very short at the front. Fortunately I was stopped before it became a mullet, but it still looks pretty damn odd.
I was only 8.
I put my age 6 (or so) class photo in the flickr group a while back. I look normal enough, in a hippy way, but there's some unfortunate expressions in there, yeah. I expect it must be near universal with that age group.
he's a thoughtful, grounded adult, so it would be very out of character for him to spontaneously tell me an invented story about a photo I've never seen
I'm thinking more that he developed that story then, and he hasn't really penetrated the mysteries of his childlike thinking at the time.
Certainly I tell stories about my childhood and wonder if what I remember thinking has any relationship to what I was actually thinking, etc.
Surely as a therapy-taker you don't think that we actually process all that stuff accurately without a lot of effort?
96.2: I mean, they were so pissed off about the white socks jokes that they forced the cancellation of the show? That's, um, wow.
The show that was "cancelled" was a sub-show ("Parma Place") within the show and was basically one long parade of Polish stereotypes/jokes. He was perpetually in trouble with the station for any number of things. Although I think the story about blowing up a rat on live TV was an urban legend (he did set off a lot of firecrackers on the set).
85, 102: Hm, so Parma:Cleveland::Cleveland:America? That would make at least some of this stuff more comprehensible, although the white socks are still a mystery.
Yes, a lot of self-deprecating humor* in the whole thing (and the various successor shows). The white socks thing was more of an idiosyncratic creation of Ernie Anderson as a general signifier of sartorial cluelessness (this was before non-kids wore sneakers in public) but it became the most well-known trope.
*That's what you had in NE Ohio. Contributed to my endearing trait of thinking of people from anyplace else as basically self-regarding fuckheads. Which they generally are.
I'm thinking more that he developed that story then, and he hasn't really penetrated the mysteries of his childlike thinking at the time.
Of why he pulled his lower lip over his upper lip? It just doesn't necessarily seem that fraught to me.
I guess that he remembers his thought process doesn't seem any more far-fetched than me remembering my explanation of why I'm not in my class photo.
||
I saw this today on FB that made my blood boil.
Office of Diversity Management and Equal Opportunity (ODMEO)
Saw a random van driving around Virginia last night. Glanced over the numerous array of patriotic bumper stickers. Stopped at one sticker that read "I have a dream." The picture next to it was a capital building with a confederate flag flying over it. Rarely am I more proud to serve the mission of this diversity office.
I have a dream that that the CSA will rise again? WTF?
|>
I guess that he remembers his thought process doesn't seem any more far-fetched than me remembering my explanation of why I'm not in my class photo.
Well, okay. I think that in the past you (or maybe it was others) have (sensibly) maintained that the reasons we do things now can be mysterious without serious introspection. Why would the reasons we did something in the past be different?
I think that in the past you (or maybe it was others) have (sensibly) maintained that the reasons we do things now can be mysterious without serious introspection.
There's a sniff test involved, though. If something isn't a loaded issue, then the reasons involved are probably pretty transparent. People have lots of loaded issues, but knowing this guy is generally pretty introspective, and he told it in a light-hearted way that didn't make my spidy sense go off.
something isn't a loaded issue
Appearance? What?!
"I was a funny-looking eight-year-old" is less fraught than most other appearance issues.
Especially if you were eight in 1979. Nobody didn't look funny then.
120: Which is why I'm also baffled by the presidentiality in 111.
95: Remember when you mentioned that driving the roads around Shiprock was the experience you had had that was most alien to what you considered normal?
I assume I qualified that as "in the US" and it probably should have been "in the continental US". For instance, McCarthy, Alaska about which I eagerly await your trip report. (I thought they had replaced the trams across the river with a footbridge, but not finding that anywhere.) Go.
Yeah, my understanding is that there's a footbridge. I may go out there at some point, but probably not anytime soon (we don't have any big projects in that park right now). It's on the road system so I could actually go on my own if I ever find the time.