From Meccania to Atlantis - Part 12: Swallowed by Leviathan
Basic Russian for crash test dummies
Recently, I was at a boomer backyard barbecue in Boston.The males had Ivy League degrees and high incomes evident in subtle ways. The wives who were white had the perfect cheekbones and teeth that only generations of breeding and expensive maintenance can produce. The nonwhite wives had PhD’s instead.
The host in a Yes We Can T-shirt sneezed. “Barack you!” said a preppie-looking man, and explained with a broad smile that it’s a new locution replacing “Bless you.”
I walked up to the Obamapod and said, “I like your barackhlo line.”
“It’s Barack you,” he said, with the typical linguistic obtuseness of the American born-and-bred, of which genus he turned out to be a prize specimen. A Harvard MD, native of North Carolina, smart and personable, he told me how he grew up in a genteel and racist home where only the N-word was used to refer to Afro-Americans. He also said that since Barack Obama’s election he was at last able to breathe.
Posts
