Here and there
One Oxbridge professor,unable to accept where he'd ended up, regularly gave himself away; he said "here" when he spoke of England, "there" when he spoke of the new world.
- Marjorie Doyle, Reels, Rock & Rosaries, Pottersfield, 2005, p. 36, inadvertently making a Great Big Funny.
posted by WJM @ 11:55 PM
1 Comments:
this comment is kinda bizarre. why is it ok for newfoundlanders and labradoreans to think of themselves as belonging to this place no matter where they live, but its not ok for anyone else to think of their birthplace always as home?????
especially since those who "come from away" find it so very hard to be accepted as newfoundlanders or labradoreans, no matter how long they've lived here, no matter how many children they've birthed here, no matter how much tax they've paid here?
ms doyle gives HERSELF away here by identifying the prof as "oxbridge" - that's not a place, it's a conceptual construct to describe a specific type of education. danny williams could reasonably be described as "oxbridge". but in a stereotyping stroke of the pen she erases whereever this person came from, SOMEWHERE in england, somewhere as dear and homey to him as st john's is to ms doyle. why shouldn't he think of it as home?
this is writing so lazy and blinkered as to defy categorization as thinking.
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