Date: 2005-07-04
From: Wynnewood, PA

To: Wynnewood, PA
Miles today: 0.0

Happy Fourth of July! I celebrated by going with family to the nearby Narberth Fourth of July Fair ¢ ¢a slice of Americana,¢ as Rob says ¢ complete with three-legged races, face paint, and pony rides. (We missed the baby parade, alas.) The whole affair is a paean to the hokey ¢ and as such, kind of endearing. ¢Rob,¢ I said, ¢there are egg races etcetera for kids up to sixteen, and for married men and women, but nothing for post-adolescent singles.¢ ¢It¢s strategic,¢ he said. ¢Singles are supposed to mingle at the booths.¢ Imagine the pickup lines:¢You and me. Moonbounce. Two-thirty. How ¢bout it?¢¢I can¢t go to the Toilet Toss with you! We only met this morning!¢¢ Hey, hot stuff, wanna go Tip the Cat?¢True to form, I was distracted by the tables of used books for sale. I came up for air a couple of hours later, realizing it was nearly time to leave and I hadn¢t even gone to see the popgun display. My big find of the day ¢ continuing my erstwhile love affair with culturally outdated self-help books, which you may recall if you read this journal back in February when I rhapsodized over the old marriage manual from the twenties ¢ was a 1932 volume by one Grenville Kleiser, entitled ¢How to Improve Your Conversation: An Aid to Social and Business Success.¢ The real jackpot chapter is the sixth one: ¢Flippancy and Slang.¢ Gems contained therein:¢Most [slang] is downright stupid, with no shadow of justification except the stunted intellect of the user.¢If you are female, and heard using such expressions as ¢hit the hay¢ or ¢throw a party¢: ¢People who do not know about your family naturally conclude that it could not have been of gentle antecedents. Hostesses who might help you very much socially are a little doubtful about you. ¢She¢s a nice girl, but ¢¢¢¢Even the purist might be forgiven a sneaking liking for ¢tightwad.¢ It is a picturesque figure of speech. Once in a while it might be allowed if accompanied by a smile and an intonation which were equivalent to quotation marks.¢¢It is likely that the so-called comic strips of the newspapers are in part to blame for our degenerate speech.¢¢In a discussion of the causes of panics or of the place of Latin in education, a humorous sally is not out of place.¢And finally, of Robert Browing: ¢Of course, he turned out a lot of awful doggerel, but the surprising thing is that he was actually proud of some of it¢¦Tennyson, the Poet Laureate, would hardly pass as a jocund figure. Just imagine his challenging Browning to find a rhyme for ¢rhinoceros.¢ The result was bad enough, the quatrain ending with ¢he can toss Eros.¢ We can get the full effect of this childish playfulness, to put the case mildly, by remembering that Browning was the most obscure of poets. Sometimes he himself did not know the meaning of what he had written.¢There were fireworks that night, out in the Narberth field, introduced by the town mayor, a guy whose last name is actually Sharkey and who has apparently been in office even longer than Cianci ever was in Providence ¢ and he¢s never interrupted his political career to serve jail time, either. So Sharkey did his spiel and then the fireworks started, which would have been entirely delightful had I not been slightly distracted by how close (very) and how low (verier) they were. I was a little afraid of being lit on fire. I told Rob I hoped there were no Vietnam vets in the field.