We pulled crackers at our Christmas dinner last month, and we’re American. My sister was hosting; she picked up the tradition from her British ex-husband. She makes us all wear the paper crowns, too.
Very unlikely.
You know , I might think the same thing- if the book was set anywhere other than NYC , where in addition to people picking up traditions of other ethnic groups, they often hold on to the traditions of one or more of their own ancestries for far longer than those living in other parts of the US. My great-grandparents left Italy somewhere around 1902- my daughter still expects a seafood dinner on Christmas Eve. Possibly while wearing a cheong-sam - although that side of the family emigrated around the same time. And they probably think seafood on Christmas Eve is an American tradition, not an Italian one. I’ve gotten the impression that in the rest of the US, ethnic traditions are pretty much gone by the third US-born generation.
How exactly does the author explain that these things are not so uncommon in NYC although they may be unknown in the rest of the country? It’s really not like explaining why a family in Mexico City is eating lutefisk- its more like explaining why a family in Minnesota is eating lutefisk.
Of all ethnic traditions, those involving food tend to persist the longest after immigration.
Regarding the Christmas crackers, you see them quite a lot NOW, but I assure you that in the 1990s in America they were truly exceptional. And NYC does contain all of these exceptions, but within a fictional work, if it’s jarring and it’s not supposed to be jarring, it’s bad research, bad writing, or bad edition, or a combination.
That’s the problem with this sort of complaint about a work – it’s based upon your own ignorance. You don’t know anything about the events being portrayed and just assume they’re wrong. For the record, Oasis was at the top of the singles charts in the US at just about this time (maybe a few months later), while Nirvana was past the peak at the time. And it was far more likely that high school kids were into the new group, not one who hit the charts a few years earlier.
Before your next post on this, I suggest you actually research the matter before making any statements.
1994 was still early in the US for Oasis. It wasn’t until about late 1995/ early 1996 that they really started gaining mainstream traction in the US. “Champagne Supernova,” “Don’t Look Back in Anger,” and “Wonderwall” were all 1996 charters in the US. “What’s the Story Morning Glory” was the big album in the US, and that peaked at #4 on the Billboard 200 in late February of 1996. While it wouldn’t be completely impossible for the scenario presented in the story if the class contained a “tastemaker” group of students that were into Oasis in 1994, it’s (in my opinion) rather unlikely in 1994 and would be quite jarring for me.
jjiimm is not off in suggesting a grunge band for that era. Pearl Jam and Alice in Chains were doing well, and Nirvana certainly was still going going strong with In Utero (perhaps their best album) and their unplugged disk. At any rate, as a freshman/sophomore in college in 1994, Nirvana was popular, if not a bit mainstream. Oasis would have been dug up by the more music nerd types, like the kids who worked at the college radio station.
I’ve seen a couple of American writers recently puting the word ‘block’ in the mouth of British characters giving directions in a British city.
‘Blocks’, in that sense, do not exist in Britain.
Really? You don’t have cross streets that run between lots and buildings? Or, as a reasonable person might infer, are they just called something else?
Or maybe the person who finds it jarring simply doesn’t know much about NYC. I’m sure that someone, somewhere finds it jarring that a character in NYC waits “on line” rather than “in line” , but they do. It wouldn’t surprise me if Oasis was popular in NYC before they were mainstream. Should the writer just ignore the reality or should he assume that most Americans can’t understand that different parts of the country have different customs and will find anything outside of their own experience to be jarring?
I don't find it jarring when a book or a movie describes the whole town turning up at the high school game. I'd find it jarring if the story was set in NYC, but I have no idea if it really happens in Texas, so why would I find it jarring?We have streets, of course, but the vast majority of UK cities are not laid out in a grid pattern. In fact virtually none are.
It seems to me that the concept of a ‘block’ is only really useful where that grid pattern exists.
O so many…
One of the worst recent offenders was a shapeshifters novel where one of the villains was Brazilian. He went from making puns in English to not understanding basic sentences; he spoke Spanish with his Mexican minions and his Spanish was clearly written by someone whose primary language was English; his Portuguese was worse than mine.
There was another one which made mistakes mixing English from both sides of the pond. It was a romance; American girl, English guy, took place on both countries. It had details such as a Florida policeman using the word “kerb” or spelling out agency names, yet the author thanked several American friends for their help with vocabulary. My guess is that she asked for some specific words, or used words she remembered hearing her American friends use, rather than having them proofread the “American” sections of the book.
There’s this pet peeve of mine, of writing the Hispanic chars adressing any figure of authority as “mi [title]”. Mi jefe, mi presidente… it’s only done in the military! President or boss are not military titles, damnit. There’s mi señor/a (mylord/lady) but again it would be only used in a feudal context - I don’t expect to see that in a text set anytime more recent than the 16th century.
A long, long time ago, I was part of a conversation with a guy from Marvel Comics and someone from their Spanish publisher, during the Setmana del Cómic de Barcelona (a Con which ok, doesn’t really run for a week like its name says; at the time it lasted five days). The guy from Marvel didn’t understand why a comic they’d picked specifically for release during that convention, set during the Spanish Civil War with Wolverine beating the crap out of every National except that short guy with the stupid 'stache, wasn’t selling and was generating tons of rolleyes. Gee, I don’t know, how well do you think “Asterix beats the crap out of the guys in grey” would sell in the US? One of the things that came up was that their translators always have a problem when there’s lines “in Spanish” in the original, as they’re usually in something which barely resembles Spanish. Now,
- Frank Castle asking a Colombian drug trafficker in Colombia for “una cigaretta” and calling another one “mi jefe”? Believable.
- Neither Colombian realizing the guy sounds like an American tourist? They must have been dipping into the snow.
- The Portuguese often displayed by Roberto da Costa, or the Spanish of any character supposedly born south of the Rio Grande, or in Spain? About as believable as the previous point.
So, do you correct that or leave it with a “N. del T.: yo no he sido”? (Translator’s Note: not my fault)
They’re called blocks in Washington DC, and in Boston. The streets there could hardly be called grids. It’s just a term used for the arbitrary distance between two cross streets. I think there is some formal definition of a ‘city block’ that is assumes some common approximate distance, but that would easily confuse someone who is following directions and simply counting the number of cross streets.
I think that it’s probably true that most British cities are less regularly arranged than US cities. Regardless, my point that the term ‘block’ is meaningless in the UK stands.
Agreed. I graduated from high school in 1995. Nobody was big into Oasis then. Nirvana, sure. Not to mention which, even though they did get some top 40 traction here in the US, they were always considered a bit on the alternative side, IMO. If I read a story in which American mainstream high school students were all huge Oasis fans, I’d lift an eyebrow too. It’s just such an odd choice.
Given that Gaelic was first written down by someone with only a passing familiarity with letters and how they sound and are assembled, I’m not surprised.
I understand what you mean. Some of our older cities often don’t have much of a grid (remember they used to be English cities). But as you go west, the grid structure can be highly regular.
Lemme see: Fish plus lye? Yep, that would equal fish soap. I’m stealing it.
Rollmops sound great, but the herring doesn’t go uneaten long enough to make them.
I think Chekhov’s gun is absolutely in play here. I grew up in a big city, too. I have no trouble believing that any sort of obscure (or approaching obscure) custom might be followed in a city as big as NYC. But IMO, something like this requires some sort of explanation beyond, “It’s NYC, there’s bound to be somebody who does this!” A sentence or two could have eliminated the awkwardness.
I was a teenager in the US in 1994, and it’s my recollection that while In Utero wasn’t as popular as Nevermind, Nirvana became bigger than ever as soon as Kurt Cobain killed himself (April '94). It would be totally plausible to me that in 1994 a class of high school kids would suddenly decide they loved Nirvana.
As for Oasis, they were popular in the US in the 1990s but it’s my recollection that this wasn’t until, as pulykamell says, a little later than 1994. 1996 sounds about right to me, and looking at chart positions on Wikipedia I see that Oasis’s first album wasn’t even released until August of '94. While it eventually went platinum in the US, it never made it above #58 on the Billboard 200. What’s the Story Morning Glory (October '95) made it to #4, and Be Here Now (August '97) hit #2. The 1994 singles “Supersonic” and “Live Forever” hit #11 and #2 respectively on the Billboard Modern Rock chart, but I have no memory of hearing either song on the radio at the time and neither went gold in the US. The band didn’t have a mainstream US hit single until late '95/early '96 with “Wonderwall” – which I remember hearing all the time.
What really strikes me as odd about an entire class being crazy for Oasis in 1994 isn’t so much the specific band though, it’s the idea that an entire class of mid-'90s NYC high school students would all like the same band. If this is a small, not very diverse class then maybe, but otherwise there’d be at least a few kids who preferred rap, R&B, metal, punk, techno, ska, etc. and didn’t really care about bands from other genres.
Attack The Block is a British film.