The Wood between the Worlds
Thursday, December 18, 2003
OK, I am done. Tests, papers, classes, all done.
My head is as empy as a well-blown nose, so I have nothing to say. But the damaged regions of my brain will regrow, sprouting flowers and mosses amid the burned out stumps as the cycle of life continues. Which is to say, I'll post more later.
Flory
Saturday, December 06, 2003
Of course, even though he is the Enemy right now (we conservatives can only think in "binaries," you know), Gately should be worth reading, so go read.
So two papers down, one to go. This is unbelievably stressful, and largely my own fault--how pathetic. There has got to be some kind of ism to blame it on. In any case I probably won't get to another post for about a week yet.
It's a pity, since blogwar has been declared, I gather. I will get around to answering because it's an interesting question and one that leads naturally to the discussion of the purpose of etiquette itself, apart from the specific forms it takes. But for now I have to limit myself to a couple of points. While I do argue that gift registries are not traditional, it is for the more or less obvious reason that they aren't.
It's not a judgment against them, they're just new. Of course people can have differing senses of how new a custom can be and still be worth calling traditional; Santa (as he is now) is somewhere around a century old. Giving diamond engagement rings, as a widespread custom, is about sixty years old. And gift registries are even newer.
I've read cranky articles criticizing the new-fangled commercial Santa, but I think there's no real reason not to call him traditional, so long as people don't confuse that tradition with the much older European tradition.
I do dislike calling diamond rings traditional, partly because it really was quite recently begun, but mostly because jewelers use the word to increase sales through guilt. Again this isn't a judgment against diamond engagement rings; I like diamond solitaires and so long as people don't give in to stupid "traditions" like expending two months' salary, there's no harm. Modern diamonds are pretty cool, actually; because of modern technology almost anyone has a chance to give or wear a ring that would have made kings and queens sick with envy. Just take a look at how clunky pre-modern settings and cuts were. But how much I like a thing has nothing to do with whether I think it's traditional.
I haven't been able to find anything about the history of registries, but Judith Martin in 1980 called it a "business gimmick," which suggests novelty to me. At any rate I know that I have read tired jokes about duplicate or useless wedding gifts in stories from the mid-century. As far as I know, gift registries started with the stodgier variety of department store and originally focused on china and silver. The current practice is quite different even from that, obviously. If anyone comes up with a more extensive history, I'd be happy to read it. In any case, I really can't be at all apologetic about refusing to call traditional something that was called a business gimmick during my lifetime. But to repeat, not being traditional says nothing about whether it is a good practice or bad.
The second thing, before I absolutely have to get back to my paper, is that class has nothing to do with it. Now that I think about it, I figure the whole practice is middle-class from start to finish, but in fact I hadn't thought about its class origins until D.G. complained in advance about my snobbery. I certainly don't care. The whole business about "toothless, gawking, bovine yokels" is not just satirical on his part but wholly made up and I honestly can't think why.
Well, one more thing. D.G. is badly mistaken about the importance I attach to this; I think he mistook the intensity of my dislike for calling novelties traditional, for my much lesser dislike of gift registries. This is baffling since I repeatedly told him that, because it would annoy people, I wasn't going to argue against using one, but I gather from his comments that he took the whole exchange as a class-based criticism of him. This is also odd, since if anything he could boast of being actually capitalist through the side of the family that owns an honest to God means of production (a factory), whereas my family is at best a running dog of capitalists. But good grief, who cares.
I'll explain later why I think gift registries are not a good custom, but it really is nothing fancier than that they seem to me to diminish the real value of giving gifts. And yes, they do also seem like buying off a menu.
John Flory
