Grammar and Rich people in fanfiction
Feb. 13th, 2008 09:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fabrisseI hate spellchecker. Loathing is too soft a word for the feeling I bear it.
Why, you ask?
It's devolving grammar.
I know in my very bones that cold tea is properly called "iced tea" that a young lady in her teens may be referred to as a "teenaged girl," but my spell check wants me to drop the d and make the words nouns (or in the case of teenage, unfinished) rather than the adjectival known as a past participle.
***
As to my second topic: I have already complained that rich people, when speaking of their homes, do not refer to them as mansions. They are houses. Houses the uninitiated may need a guide and native bearers to explore, but houses nonetheless. Mansion is an exterior description, house or home is an interior description by the person living there. I do make an exception for Lex Luthor because a) it really is the only castle in Smallville and b) the Luthors are parvenus.
Today, I read a story that I mostly enjoyed. Anyone who mentions that the devil is afraid of Angela Petrelli is all right in my book. But the take on the well-to-do exhibited a level of prejudice that would have had people demanding apologies if it had been shown for another group.
Yes, there are stupid and shortsighted rich people who can't see outside their own little world. But Bill Gates is innoculating children in Africa and donating money to universities. Andrew Carnegie was a real Gilded Age pirate, but he also valued the arts and donated structures and books and set up trusts for scholarships in many institutions in many cities.
The rich are less likely to leave money to their children than the poor are. They are more likely, statistically, to contribute a significant portion of their income to charity. And frankly, many of the social movements in this country couldn't have come to pass (Social Security being one) without rich people who'd been bred with a sense of noblesse oblige making certain the measures actually passed.
*Side note: Yes, both Roosevelt presidents were considered by many to be traitors to their class, but it should be noted those opinions were usually expressed not by old money (the Roosevelts being decended from the patroons were definitely very old money), but by those whose money had been made quickly from taking advantage of new technologies. There's nothing wrong with being new money -- by the time it gets to the grandkids it's usually sufficiently aged --
but there is a tendency to think "If I can do it, anyone can." They haven't had the old school values inculcated.*
In many ways, this sense of obligation has been passed to celebrities. The Darfur Project, Angelina Jolie's charitable perambulations, Project Red from Bono are all examples.
Don't get me wrong, when I refer to the rich bitches I went to boarding school with, I'm not being affectionate or ironic. They were bitches of the first water. But they didn't treat the black kids or the one Jewish girl in the school any differently. I was disliked because I was weird, not because I was a military brat or poorer than they. It was personal, and, after a year of abuse, it was reciprocated. Cool kids were treated well; the rest of us found our niches, and yet another high school movie about cliques is born.
My point (sorry I know I ramble) is that some people are good, some are bad, and most are somewhere in between. It doesn't matter about rich or poor. The rich can make great saints because look at all they have to renounce, and I've never heard filthier racial epithets come out of the mouth of rich than I have out of the poor.
But in fandom, there's an idea that rich people are by definition pretentious. (It's the "no one really likes opera" argument that I've heard from some people. If you say you like it, you're lying and therefore prove their point. The fact is, all the people I know who like opera like different operas.![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
gileswench can't believe my affection for Der Rosenkavalier. I know someone who loves anything by Mozart. I have a grudging liking for one production of The Magic Flute, but generally find his music dull.) And that view of pretention goes over into an idea of how they act and what they hate.
The fact is some rich people know more about poverty and its toll than average. Their money has given them the time to work on projects to improve literacy or get milk to children or work at battered women's shelters.
Had there been one rich person who behaved well, who didn't talk about people who "aren't one of us" in the story, I'd've been fine with it. Instead, we're supposed to sympathize with the only character who's truly badly behaved because he's normal and not like "them."
Oh, well.
Why, you ask?
It's devolving grammar.
I know in my very bones that cold tea is properly called "iced tea" that a young lady in her teens may be referred to as a "teenaged girl," but my spell check wants me to drop the d and make the words nouns (or in the case of teenage, unfinished) rather than the adjectival known as a past participle.
***
As to my second topic: I have already complained that rich people, when speaking of their homes, do not refer to them as mansions. They are houses. Houses the uninitiated may need a guide and native bearers to explore, but houses nonetheless. Mansion is an exterior description, house or home is an interior description by the person living there. I do make an exception for Lex Luthor because a) it really is the only castle in Smallville and b) the Luthors are parvenus.
Today, I read a story that I mostly enjoyed. Anyone who mentions that the devil is afraid of Angela Petrelli is all right in my book. But the take on the well-to-do exhibited a level of prejudice that would have had people demanding apologies if it had been shown for another group.
Yes, there are stupid and shortsighted rich people who can't see outside their own little world. But Bill Gates is innoculating children in Africa and donating money to universities. Andrew Carnegie was a real Gilded Age pirate, but he also valued the arts and donated structures and books and set up trusts for scholarships in many institutions in many cities.
The rich are less likely to leave money to their children than the poor are. They are more likely, statistically, to contribute a significant portion of their income to charity. And frankly, many of the social movements in this country couldn't have come to pass (Social Security being one) without rich people who'd been bred with a sense of noblesse oblige making certain the measures actually passed.
*Side note: Yes, both Roosevelt presidents were considered by many to be traitors to their class, but it should be noted those opinions were usually expressed not by old money (the Roosevelts being decended from the patroons were definitely very old money), but by those whose money had been made quickly from taking advantage of new technologies. There's nothing wrong with being new money -- by the time it gets to the grandkids it's usually sufficiently aged --
but there is a tendency to think "If I can do it, anyone can." They haven't had the old school values inculcated.*
In many ways, this sense of obligation has been passed to celebrities. The Darfur Project, Angelina Jolie's charitable perambulations, Project Red from Bono are all examples.
Don't get me wrong, when I refer to the rich bitches I went to boarding school with, I'm not being affectionate or ironic. They were bitches of the first water. But they didn't treat the black kids or the one Jewish girl in the school any differently. I was disliked because I was weird, not because I was a military brat or poorer than they. It was personal, and, after a year of abuse, it was reciprocated. Cool kids were treated well; the rest of us found our niches, and yet another high school movie about cliques is born.
My point (sorry I know I ramble) is that some people are good, some are bad, and most are somewhere in between. It doesn't matter about rich or poor. The rich can make great saints because look at all they have to renounce, and I've never heard filthier racial epithets come out of the mouth of rich than I have out of the poor.
But in fandom, there's an idea that rich people are by definition pretentious. (It's the "no one really likes opera" argument that I've heard from some people. If you say you like it, you're lying and therefore prove their point. The fact is, all the people I know who like opera like different operas.
gileswench can't believe my affection for Der Rosenkavalier. I know someone who loves anything by Mozart. I have a grudging liking for one production of The Magic Flute, but generally find his music dull.) And that view of pretention goes over into an idea of how they act and what they hate. The fact is some rich people know more about poverty and its toll than average. Their money has given them the time to work on projects to improve literacy or get milk to children or work at battered women's shelters.
Had there been one rich person who behaved well, who didn't talk about people who "aren't one of us" in the story, I'd've been fine with it. Instead, we're supposed to sympathize with the only character who's truly badly behaved because he's normal and not like "them."
Oh, well.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 03:16 am (UTC)Yes I can. I just don't share it. You should have met my mother, though. It was one of her favorites. Then again, like me, she adored Mozart. And there was no word dirtier than Richard Wagner to my father.
Like you, though, I hate fanfic where people who share an economic status/religion/racial background/fondness for sci-fi/fill in the blank all behave in exactly the same way and share all the same opinions. That's not human nature.
And I really, REALLY hate fic where the person who behaves in the worst way is presented as the hero. Ick.
Spell Check must die. It is deeply confused on way too many points.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 04:50 am (UTC)The author did well enough in that she made it clear his bad behavior was mostly due to insecurity. But really. I've known some people who make the Luthors look like choirboys, but it wasn't because they were rich. It was because they were venal.
no subject
Date: 2008-02-14 07:11 am (UTC)Precisely. Funds don't change basic personality; they just give the opportunity to go the distance with the personality you already have.
Eddie Canter used his wealth to help create the March of Dimes, establish a summer camp for inner city Jewish kids to get out in the country and the fresh air (it's still open, and Gene Simmons (a camp alumnus) and Pete Seegar (a close neighbor) have been known to give concerts there together), and personally help Jews to get safely out of Nazi Germany. He was a helpful guy who did his best to take care of people. He also encouraged other celebrities to give generously to social causes in a time when actors, musicians, and so on rarely made grand philanthropic gestures, even if they were pretty wealthy. Also? He lost his sponsor for his top-rated radio show when he was the first star to speak out publicly against Hitler.
There are others who made it big or inherited big who wouldn't bend over to help another human being in time of need. It's all a matter of who they would have been anyway.
As for the other...you say soporific, I say precise and joyful. Let's call the whole thing off...which is probably a tune we can actually agree on.