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Living in Manhattan, you become accustomed to a certain amount of, well, expansiveness. Meet a waiter socially, and they will tell you that they're studying acting. Meet a banker and they'll mention the big deal they worked on last year, rather than the one that tanked last week. It's human nature, I suppose, or at least second nature to New Yorkers, and a reversal of the cultural code that New Zealanders have. Our way of communicating is to drop subtle hints that are expected to be detected for what they are.
Example one: the Kiwi political minder who mentioned to me that he'd been to university in England. "Which one?" I asked. "Cambridge," he replied. Note: He wasn't skiting, but this came as a pleasant grace note in what has been an ever deafening symphony of self-advertisement lately.
A counter-example: I was at a party recently, conversing with someone who seemed perfectly reasonable, and described themselves as "living between New York and London". 'Ha!' said another friend, "he's sleeping on a couch in Queens."
A pal tells of a date she had. For the first 20 minutes the chap rattled on about how important his work was (he was in IT, which is surely important, but not exactly sparkling material for a first date), and that he was Italian-Argentine. Turns out he grew up in New Jersey.
Everyone wants to gild the lily, but this is brazen. "I think it's a sign of the economic slowdown," a New Zealand businessman told me. "My wife and I were talking about this last night. Everyone wants to say they're great, that they've got money."
So they doth protest too much. It's what you might call, a "bloody shirt" moment. Indulge me, and I'll explain later.
You could say that this rising tide of conversational bilgewater matches an erosion in what is grandly called "political discourse". Liberals and conservatives have always shouted at one another, but at least they once appeared to speak the same language. Now I'm not so sure. There's a financial reform bill passing through the Senate at the moment. The Republicans say it'll enshrine bailouts. The Democrats say the Republicans don't want to pass it because their friends the bankers will be unhappy. Yet Goldman Sachs was the largest contributor to Obama's presidential campaign. Of course the Goldmine must be choking now that the SEC has slapped an eye-catching fraud suit on them. The fact is that both political parties will emerge from this linguistic haze and be found asking Wall Street, in clear American English, for money to help fund the 2012 election. Doubtless Goldman, which will have settled the suit by then, will be at the top of their list.
Is this increasing lividity significant? Perhaps. But it's not new. Listen to this description of late 19th century America, from novelist Kevin Baker in the April Harper's magazine: "Elections tended to be colourful festival, often decided on the basis of personality, or gaffes endlessly harped on the in outrageous, highly partisan media of the day... Candidates appealed to voters mostly by appealing to their ethnic and social identities, 'waving the bloody shirt' to remind their audiences of the treasonable crimes the other side had committed during the bitter culture wars of the Sixties - the 1860s, that is."
Thus the "bloody shirt" can mean, "They're wicked," and also,
"I'm fine!" depending on how it's waved.
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