Making everyone a little uneasy came naturally. I used to like being told I was “intimidating,” because it seemed to sanction my verbal jabbing to maintain a perimeter. Though I have an outsize grin, and friends take pleasure in trying to elicit it, I am reserved upon first meeting (it’s Wasp women who are expected to charm). I have a soft laugh, and I rarely raise my voice. I politely stand aside: no, no, after you. And, like the Tin Man, I don’t articulate my upper body sections it moves en masse or not at all. I will never experience the pleasures of chest hair. I will never experience the pleasures of leather pants or a shark’s tooth on a thong dangling in my chest hair. I have a concise and predictable wardrobe, and friends even claim that I inevitably wear the same oatmeal – colored Shetland sweater. And atop the Wasp fridge sit Pepperidge Farm Milanos, Fig Newtons, or Saltines – some chewy or salty or otherwise challenging snack). (The Wasp fridge is like the bachelor fridge, but Wasps load up on dairy, including both 1 and 2 percent milk, moldy cheese, expired yogurt, and separated sour cream. Until quite recently, I had the Wasp fridge: marmalade, wilted scalions, out-0f-season grapes, seltzer and vodka – nothing to really eat. Oh, sure, I don’t belong to any clannish or exclusive clubs, I prefer beer to hard liquor, I am neither affable nor peevish – the alternating currents of Wasp – and I love pop culture.Īnd yet. In this and more important respects I seem to have become, somehow, a motley product of my famously marvelous background. That cast of mind is excessively attuned to such questions as how you say “tomato” – a word I now find myself pronouncing both ways, usually at random and always with misgiving. Bean to the north, the shingle style to the east, Robert Falcon Scott’s doomed polar expedition to the south, and the limits of Horace Greely’s optimism to the west. They lived in a floating Ruritania losely bounded by L.L. But my family and their friends, as Wasps, were circumscribed less by skin tones and religion than by a set of traditions and expectations: a cast of mind. I’m too cheap to spring for a new acronym. Worse, the adjective is pejorative: “Waspy” is reserved for horse-faced women, tight-assed men, penny pinchers, and a capella groups. Elvis Presley was a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant, as is Bill Clinton, but they are not what anyone means by “Wasp.” Waspiness is an overlay on human character, like the porcelain veneer that protects the surface of a damaged tooth. The ACRONYM “Wasp,” from “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” is one many Wasps dislike, as it’s redundant – Anglo-Saxons are perforce white – and inexact. Given the frequency with which the term Wasp is bandied about by fashion bloggers, and particularly in light of the recent dust up between Ivy Style and Wasp 101, I thought it might be useful to let someone with some expertise on the matter cast some light. In the first chapter of Cheerful Money, Friend begins to unpack the meaning of Wasp and discusses why that term is not really accurate in describing old money families and their mores. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker and a graduate of Harvard University. Tad Friend, in his 2009 memoir Cheerful Money: Me, My Family and the Last Days of Wasp Splendor, reveals in candid detail his complicated upbringing and emotionally insular life in an illustrious family, which includes a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a president of Swarthmore College and generations of Ivy League degrees.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |