Posts by Craig Ranapia
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Deborah,
Every now and then someone rings up and asks for Mr Russell, or Mrs Wright. Whatever. I get a bit uptight if people persist in using calling me Mrs Wright: I *hate* being addressed with “Mrs”.
Yikes…. Hell, I’ll admit it’s pretty deep in my etiquette basecode not to be impertinently familiar by addressing strangers by their first names until invited to do so. (Even then, I really don’t like the “call me Kenneth” routine with employers, because it implies social equality that doesn’t really exist.)
All that said, it’s also a non-trivial mark of respect to use the honorific style people express a preference for. (A good example is the custom in Parliament when it comes to people with doctorates. Some use the title, others don’t. The rule of thumb is to follow the preference of the person concerned, and it’s a good one.) It also reflects the social reality that women no longer exist in a binary state of married/not married.
If in doubt, it never hurts to ask because as they say in the US Marine Corps when you ASSUME you make an ASS out of U and ME both.
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Russell Brown,
Best example of which I am aware: the Gracewood family. Grace + Wood x Deed Poll.
Or you could go the Torchwood route: Pull out the Scrabble tiles and see if you can come up with a funky anagram of your surnames.
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For teachers especially. What happens when your grand children get married and their full name is Chester Lowe-Smith-Higgins-Carter-Jones-Samuels-Matoto-Yin ???
Well, there's a number of options - mostly under the broad heading of "common social usage and legal formality amicably parted ways".If the Duchess of Cambridge ever gets around to dropping the sprog, the poor little tyke could have ended up with the ungainly moniker " Mountbatten-Windsor" (which sounds like the unholy union of a railway station and a tea cake) or even "Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg (which sounds like you're sleeping with a whole branch line). Have my doubts either would have stuck.
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Hard News: Who else forgot to get married?, in reply to Jason Kemp,
There is (of course) more than one dashboard. The other stat not mentioned is the divorce rate among those who do get married.
To thrash that idiom to death, the scariest thing about Bob McCoskrie's dashboard is you're in a clown car heading nowhere any rational person wants to go.
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Muse: Worthwhile Literature, Worthless Newspaper, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Wills was such a sleaze -- or a commercial playwright who had a perfectly sound understanding that fucks, fights and smut paid the bills.
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Testy!
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Up Front: Somebody Think of the Young Adults!, in reply to Rob Stowell,
"Worthwhile literature” – just want to roll that around on the tongue for a while, it’s so gigglesome :)
Not as laughable a notion as you might think. I got quite a worthwhile literary education looking for fucks and dirty words – not least from the copy of Maurice Gee’s Sole Survivor I got at my boarding school prizegiving for excellence in 4th Form English. (That’s the one that opens with a pretty saucy description of the novel’s narrator spying on a teenage relation having acrobatic intercourse in a river with a very well-hung chappy. This was the same school where I had my copy of Princess Daisy confiscated, and I’ll be damned if I can remember which party to that awkward moment was more embarrassed.
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Up Front: Somebody Think of the Young Adults!, in reply to Keir Leslie,
Is it a book that you would even wish your husband, or, even, your servants to read?
If my servants have the time to read anything more involved that the wrapper on a bar of carbolic soap, they will be killed and fed to the dogs. Plenty more pre-literate waifs down the workhouse they came from.
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Up Front: Somebody Think of the Young Adults!, in reply to Joshua Drummond,
This is the cliche to end all cliches, but only one thing came to mind reading that editorial – “The Victorians called. They want their editorial back”.
Which could only be said by anyone who hasn't read much in the way of Victorian fiction -- even if you subtract Dickens from the equation, just because it wasn't explicit it doesn't mean it wasn't there.
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Teenagers have access to a lot of shitty depictions of sex.
A fair number of which appear under the masthead of the New Zealand Herald. (Was that a cheap shot. Fuck yes, but also a totally justified one.)
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