Valentines and Sentiment — Particularism vs. Universalism

February 14, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

For Valentine’s day when I was in kindergarten, we had to bring a Valentine’s card for every other kid in the class. Many years later, in my intro classes, I often used this as an example of universalism and particularism. We usually think of love as particularistic, something that depends on the particular people involved. We treat the other person according to the special aspects of the person and the relationship, not according to some universal rules that apply equally to everyone. But in Miss Carmen’s kindergarten, everyone said Be My Valentine to everyone else.

Maybe the same rule applied in first and second grade or beyond. I can’t remember. But at some point, we learn that a Valentine’s card and the sentiment it represents is for “that special someone,”

With friendships and friendliness however, we Americans are still kindergartners. Or at least that’s how non-Americans see it. When they come to the US they are often pleasantly surprised at how friendly and welcoming Americans are. Perfect strangers treating you so warmly. But after a while they are frustrated, for what passes as a friendship here seems superficial and temporary, so unlike friendships from their native countries. As a student from France told anthropologist Cathy Small,

Sure I have friends. It’s so easy to meet people here, to make friends. Well, not really friends. That’s the thing. Friendship is very surface-defined here. It is easy to get to know people, but the friendship is superficial. We wouldn’t even call it a friendship. In France, when you’re someone’s friend, you’re their friend for life

The other way I had of explaining particularism and universalism hinged on the idea of what something is worth. Usually, we measure that in the universalistic terms of money. A dollar is a dollar no matter whose wallet it’s in.  But I would glance around the room looking for a girl wearing a ring or necklace, one that looked special. An engagement ring was the ideal. “Where’d you get that?” I would ask, and often the answer was the kind I was looking for. “My boyfriend gave it to me,” or “It was my grandmother’s.”

We would come to some assessment of what its dollar value might be, and I would then ask if she would sell me the ring for double that. The answer was always No. I would then ask others in the class, “If you had bought this ring for $200 and I now offered you $400, would you take it.” Yes, of course. You could go back the store, buy one just like it, and pocket the extra $200. But to the girl wearing that ring, its value is particularistic, based on the particular people involved.

I would sometimes bring in the example from “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” — the ring from a box of Crackerjacks, worthless to everyone except the two lovers — even though I knew that most students would not be familiar with it.* But it’s such a good example.


I was reminded of this by a segment of the Valentine’s episode of the Planet Money podcast. One of their economics reporters, Mary Childs said that she would give a Valentine to her favorite website, where entire estates are auctioned. She loves it because it is a perfect example of “price discovery” — finding out how much money something is worth. She also seems pleased that discovering the price has the sobering effect of deflating the particularistic value.

It turns out, a lot of this stuff is basically worthless. There’ll be a lot of lots that go for like two dollars or five dollars. . . . .When we’re alive we imbue all our possessions with all this importance and all of this meaning. . . But in the end it turns out that all this stuff — your precious stuff — is just stuff.

As Oscar Wilde said, “What is an economist? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” (OK, he didn’t say “economist”; he said “cynic.” But the difference may be hard to perceive here just as it is with the economic view of the “deadweight loss” of Christmas presents )

HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY

To Everyone

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* Not all students were unfamiliar with it. One semester, when I referred to “the movie based on the Truman Capote short story,” I heard a girl off to my right mutter sotto voce, “novella.”

Did They Really Say That in 1882?

February 12, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

Language anachronisms in “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel” and “Mad Men” often came through loud and clear, at least to my ears. The shows were set in 1960, a time when I was alive — speaking and listening. (See earlier posts here and here ) “The Gilded Age” on HBO is set in 1882, before my time. Still, some of the language in this week’s episode, “Face the Music,” sounded more recent. Julian Fellowes, who created the show and did much of the writing, came in for some criticism (here, for example) for the language anachronisms in his “Downton Abbey.” I can just see him chuckling now as he waves the title “Face the Music” to lure in the language police and then swats them back by having Mr. Russell say, “To employ a modern phrase, I'm afraid you must face the music.’”

OK, “face the music” was not a phrase before its time. But in 1882 it wasn’t exactly modern either. My own memory does not extend back to 1882. That’s why we (and that includes Mr. Fellowes) have the Oxford English Dictionary, and according to the OED, this “modern phrase” has one example from a newspaper fifty years before the Gilded Age and another from 1850: “There should be no skulking or dodging...every man should ‘face the music’.”

If you’re not watching the show, know that Mr. Russell is the nouveau-riche businessman. His adversaries who must face the music are the establishment wealthy. They have connived to ruin him financially, but Russell outwits them, using his own wealth to put them on the verge of financial ruin. He will have his revenge. “I didn't see this coming. I admit it. I thought you were honorable men. Not too honorable to miss the chance of a fat buck, of course, but not greedy, dirty thieves.”

He adds, “I thought I was the one who might throw a curveball.”

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Curveball? By 1882, pitchers had been throwing curveballs for a decade. But they were literal curveballs. Metaphorical curveballs didn’t come into play for another half-century.

In an earlier scene, Russell’s daughter uses the phrase “the thing is.”

This too sounded modern to my ears, even if she did not use the double “is” that many people today  add, as in “The thing is is that it’s very recent.”  I may have been wrong. The OED finds Matthew Arnold using it 1873. “The question [of a state church]..is..so absolutely unimportant! The thing is, to recast religion.” I’m not sure that this is exactly the way we use it. The first clear example of that in the OED is from John Galsworthy in 1915. “Look here, old man, the thing is, of course, to see it in proportion.”

Finally, there was “identify.” Miss Scott has submitted her short stories to a newspaper. They are, the editor tells her, “beautifully constructed and executed.” The problem is that Miss Scott is Black and so is the main character in the story under consideration. The editor tells her that some adjustments will be necessary.

“The little colored girl would need to be changed to a poor white child.”

Why, she asks.  

“Our readers will not identify with a colored girl's story of redemption.”

I was mostly wrong about this one. Identify in this sense goes back at least to the early 1700s. But until the mid-20th century there was always a pronoun like himself or onesself  between identify and with. What the editor should have said is “Our readers will not identify themselves with a colored girl’s story.” In 1882, the reflexive pronoun was still required. Today, it has been absorbed into the word identify.

Trends in the Word Market

February 10, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

Kieran Healy tweeted recently about his 2017 paper “Fuck Nuance.”

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

I wondered again, as I wondered when I heard Kieran present this paper at the ASA meetings,* is nuance itself a recent thing, or is it just that the word has become fashionable? The Nexis-Uni database of news finds only seven instances of the word before 1975, the first coming in 1969. Before then, there was no nuance to fuck.

The word seems to have been put into play by theater critics. But surely there must have been performances in earlier decades that critics of the 70s and beyond would have called “nuanced.” Praise for scholarly writings as nuanced happens a decade or so later. But how might an earlier take on those same performances or writings have phrased it?

I don’t know.

Then there’s “sustainable.” How I wish I had bought stock in Sustainable in 1980. It would have been like buying Bitcoin in 2010. But in this case, I have a good idea of the word sustainable replaced: viable.

I associate the word with the Kennedy administration. It seemed that government higher-ups were always talking about “viable options.” Today we would call them “sustainable options.” For example, today’s Inside Higher Ed (here) quotes someone saying of a colleague, “the demands of both his role here and his elected position are not sustainable.” He means that the colleague can’t fulfill the demands of both roles. Or to put it in the language of 1965, continuing in both roles is not a viable option.

Perhaps “nuance” no longer be viable. It will see the fading of its cachet, and I will look back and wonder why I didn’t sell my Nuance shares as soon as I heard Kieran present that paper.

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* The title was the first slide in Kieran’s presentation, and it remained on the screen as Kieran took care of technical matters at the podium. Then he clicked to the second slide, which, if memory serves, was “No, seriously. Fuck it.”

Consider the Social Class of the Lobster

January 26, 2022
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Food isn’t about nutrition,” wrote Robin Hanson some years ago (here). But it’s also not about taste, or at least not all about taste. Which foods we prize and which we despise also depends on what the food says about the people who consume it, especially their social status.

In the first episode of “The Gilded Age,” the Russells decide to throw an elegant dinner party. They are newly rich, very rich, and new to the neighborhood, Fifth Avenue at 61st St., where they have built a mansion. Mrs. Russell thinks that the dinner, along with generous donations to old-money charities, will bring the Russells entree into “society.”

She is wrong. Old money snubs her. The Russells prepare for 200 guests. Nobody comes.

Like an officer reviewing the troops, she walks past the tables laden with elegant foods.

“What will you do with it all?” asks her husband.
“Church. Get the kitchen staff to box it up and send a message in the morning to the Charity Organization Society. Ask them to collect it.”
“I don’t know what the poor of New York will make of lobster salad.”

He’s wrong. The poor would remember the times not so long ago when lobster was a food for common people, not a delicacy for the elite.

Lobster, as David Foster Wallace mentions in passing in his famous essay, was not always a delicacy. In the early days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, lobster was trash food. It was fed to prisoners. Two hundred fifty years later, the social status of lobster hadn’t improved. In the 1870s, indentured servants sued, successfully, so that their masters could feed them lobster no more than three times a week. [From a blogpost of two years ago, here.]

“The Gilded Age” begins in 1882, which is possibly the inflection point in the lobster trajectory from prole trash to pricey treat. The sites I’ve looked at say imprecisely that the change started “in the 1880s,” so it could have been any time in that decade. I would have loved it if the show had used this history to a culinary dimension to the conflict. The Russells, with their antennae tuned to the latest in fashions, have their groaning board include the new hot item — lobster. Meanwhile in the mansion across the street, old-money Agnes Van Rhijn (Christine Baranski) learns of this and comments to Ada (Cynthia Nixon), “And did you hear? Lobster. Indeed. Does she really expect that anyone in society would tolerate being served lobster?”