I once had a friend try to set me up with a guy she thought would be perfect for me. We had a phone conversation before going out on a date. I asked something about what he did for a living, and he answered, “I’m in the film industry.”
My friend had already told me that this guy was a lighting guy. It’s not like he was a producer or anything glamorous. I guess he was playing the odds and figured I’d be impressed, but since I had about an equally glamorous job in the film industry at the time, I wasn’t.
Plus, come on, this was LA. It’s not like film industry people aren’t a dime a dozen. If only he’d known I was practically a sure thing at the time and only really cared whether or not he was hot looking.
Abusing people in iambic verse,
With meter on, unstressed then stressed in turn.
Five rhythmic feet, then end it with a curse
On snobbery. Pretension, thee I spurn.
Waverly, I believe you when you say it might offend someone at a traditional Chinese dinner, in China, to eat with a fork. I’ve never been to China, and you apparently have. I did spend several years in Japan, where restaurants do occasionally provide forks, and never saw anyone react in any negative way to the sight of one. Nonetheless, I’m well aware that Chinese and Japanese cultures are dissimilar in countless ways, so I’ll take your word on that.
But I don’t believe for one moment that it would offend anyone at all, even a “traditional Chinese person,” whatever that is, to eat greasy, heat-lamped, bland General Tso’s Chicken at the Panda Garden in the food court at a mall in Provo, Utah, with a dull, plastic, fork-ish utensil.
Not to mention that General Tso’s Chicken is, accorrding to Wikipedia:
(Emphasis added.)
And as for cultural sensitivity, I just don’t see the moral imperative. In America, most people don’t know how to use chopsticks, or simply aren’t practiced enough with them to eat a satisfying meal. Should these people avoid Chinese restaurants entirely until they can feed themselves using an instrument (or pair thereof) whch they might have occasion to use once or twice a year? Should Chinese restaurants just stop providing forks? The comedy value would be astronomical, but it would surely put a crimp in business if the local Lotus Garden (where one is, I would think, decidedly more likely to encounter Chinese people eating than at the food court) decided to force its customers to eat with chopsticks.
I’m sure the instructor was quite pretentious, but I also feel that there is a grain of truth to what he says. As I believe someone else pointed out (regarding Marx, I think), someone translated the work and a very well could have intended the ‘morning/mourning’ thing.
Even if the translator didn’t intend it and it was in fact entirely unintentional, it seems to me that you can still talk about it as something you see in the work.
Waverly, in addition to living in an area where I was the only white person surrounded by a mostly Asians, dining in restaurants where no English was spoken (I just let my Chinese friends order for me), living with a 1st generation Asian immigrants (who assumed that I didn’t know how to use chopsticks and handed me a fork the first time I ate), I also have a lot of Chinese friends with whom I eat on a regular basis. One of my friends is from a very wealthy Chinese family and grew up in Asia. He, and my other Asian friends, have been teaching me proper Chinese manners for some time now. To give you an idea of the wealth of his family, he is about 22 and looking for a home worth at least a million in addition to paying for two very nice apartments in Southern California. Just the other day, he asked me to pick up some food for him from a local Chinese restaurant. When I brought it to his house, he ate it with a fork.
Your argument only applies to very traditional formal dinners. In such a situation, eating with a fork could be offensive (I did a quick poll of my Asian friends and none of them said they would consider it as such), I hardly think a the food court in a mall is a place where one would be considered offensive for using a fork.
I think someone could gather up mission statements (I imagine dozens are available out there on the interweb) and some snarky commentary, and publish them in the humor section, and make a bundle.
Mission statements are designed to squeeze as many buzzwords as possible into a single sentence.
On the Dilbert web site is a mission statement generator. It takes a list of buzzwords and strings them together to create mission statements every bit as realistic as those that come from Corporate America.
No, Miller, I didn’t miss it. I’m just suggesting that perhaps a person might observe a custom they have learned even when dining on General Tso. I would too. Not to impress others, or myself, but it just feels more polite. I’m polite person. You do agree that, while most Chinese are tolerant of the knife and fork, that there is a cultural taboo against these utensils, correct? I mean Kimera’s story is engrossing, but let’s check in with some 3rd parties, eh?
Could I just clarify that we’re talking here specifically about “Chinese” culture, not “Asian” in general. Many other Asian countries and cultures use various combinations of forks, spoons and knives. Asia’s a big continent.
At an old friend’s wedding a few years back, I saw many many people who I hadn’t seen since we were all teenagers. When asked what he did for a living, he said “I work in a law firm” very self-importantly. Bless my friend’s mom, who said, “And what do you DO there?” forcing him to admit he was the mail clerk.
None of those say that a white person eating Chinese food with a fork is regarded as offensive. I’m going to believe my Chinese friends, who I have observed eating Chinese food with forks, over some white guy from the internet. I’ll poke my Chinese doper friends and try to get one of them to post to this thread.
A post brought up one of my pet pretension peeves (and I really hope we can avoid a prescriptivist/descriptivist debate over this one). While ‘the hoi polloi’ is acceptable in English, it seems to be overwhelmingly used by people who a) want to sound smart by displaying their knowledge of classical Greek and b) end up sounding utterly dumb to a classicist. ‘The hoi polloi’ technically means ‘the the many’ - with a doubled article and an implication of it referring to the unwashed masses, not the hoity-toity people.
It was especially funny when I pointed this out to a guy in my Latin class who was attempting to castigate the prof for saying that people don’t or rarely use the subjunctive in English.
It’s pretty clear that you did. What makes it pretentious isn’t the part where he asks for chopsticks at a Chinese restaurant, it’s the part where he turns around and explains to the two complete strangers in line behind him how he can’t eat Chinese food with a fork because he’s been to Taiwan. Wether or not its considered rude by the Chinese to eat with a fork isn’t the point. The point is making a big deal about how well travelled you are and how you know so much more about foreign customs than “the hoi polloi.” That’s pretty damned pretentious, right there.
