I'm an American living overseas. These sound so very true.
In South Africa I was told that all Americans wear sneakers ("trainers", above), wear a baseball cap, and carry a water bottle. I mentioned this to my sister. She asked "how else do you stay hydrated?".
In Sweden I talked about how I lived in Santa Fe, which is "an hour north of Albuquerque." Several commented about how I, like other Americans, use time instead of distance. Also, I told them about how when I first started coming to Sweden I had to wear my best clothes so I wouldn't feel out of place. I got confused looks. "But Sweden has a rather casual workplace dress style." I replied "in my previous jobs, the dress style was 'no holes in the T-shirts'" and that I only had a couple of button-down shirts.
Someone else commented about Americans wearing North Face jackets. Outdoor gear is a good predictor, though not perfect. Germans love their Jack Wolfskin. French wear Quechua or Mammut. Swedes wear Fjällräven or Haglöfs. And Americans wear North Face.
Once upon a time the people of Generation X were called "slackers." We had no direction in life, felt disenfranchised, and went from one dead-end job to the next. Copeland wrote a book about us, and Kevin Smith made Clerks about us. Our music wasn't as good as the hippie generation, and of course the parents of the hippies are now known as the Greatest Generation.
Once upon a time the youth of the 1960s were called hippies. "Turn on, tune in, drop out" was the mantra of the day. They joined communes, did drugs, and went to mass marches. They only thought of today, and never tomorrow. People went on TV and wrote long editorials about the death of American culture. It was all Dr. Spock's fault for encouraging permissiveness and an expectation of instant gratification.
Once upon a time the youth were called greasers ... beatniks ... flappers ... the list goes on.
So to the Millennials, welcome to the club. On behalf of history, I apologize. Promise me that in 30 years you won't write the same stories about the next generation?
My mom's dad was buried in a casket he made himself. My mom did the inside quilting, and others in the family worked on other parts. My grandmother, still alive, has the parts for her casket underneath her bed. For them, it's a combination of cost and family involvement.
I know such places still exist. Some famous fountains which I know are gravity fed include: those at Hellbrunn Palace, Austria, Hackfall Fountain in England, Peterhof Palace and Garden in Russia, and still some of the fountains in Rome.
In any case, it's not hard to build a gravity fountain for yourself, so long as there's a stream in a hill above where you want the fountain. I found several eHow descriptions of how to build one. It can be as simple as running a hose up the hillside, putting a wire mesh over the end, which you hold down on the stream bed with a couple of big rocks.
Or, the hedge maze fountain might use a hybrid system, where water is pumped up to a reservoir which feeds fountains at lower elevations. (The Grotte de Thétys supports one such reservoir for the gardens of Versailles.) Even without power, there can still be enough water and pressure to run the fountains for a while.
In addition, some fountains are hooked to the public water supply. In Basel there are public fountains seemingly everywhere, running continuously, and since many contain drinking water, it's not simply a pump recycling the water. In this case it would be the water company providing the pressure, not the maze's own pumps.
While I realize that most fountains are powered by electricity, it could be gravity fed. That's how nearly all fountains until the late 1800s worked, including the fountains of Rome. How is Sherman so certain that this isn't one such?
The Great Dane "Just Nuisance" ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_Nuisance ) was enlisted in the Royal Navy in part to get the free rail travel granted to all sailors. This meant he could go back and forth between Simon's Town and Cape Town.
Amazing indeed. It was apparently controversial to teach girls to be babysitters: "Little Mothers Leagues where eight- to nine-year-old girls were taught how to take care of younger children while their mothers were working to earn a living to support the children. Many protested that the Leagues were "enslaving the young girls so their mothers could be irresponsible, go to the movies, or get drunk"." ... "If we're going to save the lives of all the women and children at public expense, what incentive will there be for a young man to go into medicine?" .. "a petition was signed by more than 30 Brooklyn physicians and sent to the mayor demanding that the bureau be abolished because "it was ruining medical practice by its results in keeping babies well"."
There is no evolution of language here. Chaucer used a singular 'they' in Canturbury Tales in 1400, the Tynsdale Bible in the 1500s, the King James in the early 1600s, Shakespeare in the late 1600s, and so on. Lewis Carroll, Walt Whitman, George Eliot, William Thackeray and other famous authors used singular they. Anyone who thinks this is a recent invention, brought on perhaps by some sort of political correctness, does not know the history of our language.
Perhaps you think it's wrong in modern usage. You can appeal to William Safire and insist on 'he', and I can appeal to sources ranging from 'Fowler's Modern English Usage' to Grammar Girl. Yippee. So let's test it out.
Here's a line from C. S. Lewis's "Voyage of the Dawn Treader": “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.” Do the "he" fans here serious think that should be ".. in his clothes"? I find the change from "her" to a "(gender-neutral) he" somewhat odd. (I believe this could replaced with "... one's clothes", but then 'everybody' should be changed to 'everyone'. Meh.)
But perhaps you insist that "he" is gender-neutral. What about "At the funeral, everyone was dressed to the nines, each wearing his nicest dress or swankest tie." or "Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes?" Are you so sure now that he/his is gender neutral? (And using "one's" for the second case certainly doesn't work.)
I'll quote from "Motivated Grammar": You don’t have to use singular they yourself. You can go ahead and re-work your sentences to avoid it. You can employ he or she, or s/he, or a made-up gender-neutral pronoun of your own devising like xe. You can even just stubbornly plow on, using he as a gender-neutral pronoun until you grow tired of people pointing out that it isn’t really. I don’t care, and you’re not grammatically wrong. But you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not.
In South Africa I was told that all Americans wear sneakers ("trainers", above), wear a baseball cap, and carry a water bottle. I mentioned this to my sister. She asked "how else do you stay hydrated?".
In Sweden I talked about how I lived in Santa Fe, which is "an hour north of Albuquerque." Several commented about how I, like other Americans, use time instead of distance. Also, I told them about how when I first started coming to Sweden I had to wear my best clothes so I wouldn't feel out of place. I got confused looks. "But Sweden has a rather casual workplace dress style." I replied "in my previous jobs, the dress style was 'no holes in the T-shirts'" and that I only had a couple of button-down shirts.
Someone else commented about Americans wearing North Face jackets. Outdoor gear is a good predictor, though not perfect. Germans love their Jack Wolfskin. French wear Quechua or Mammut. Swedes wear Fjällräven or Haglöfs. And Americans wear North Face.
Once upon a time the youth of the 1960s were called hippies. "Turn on, tune in, drop out" was the mantra of the day. They joined communes, did drugs, and went to mass marches. They only thought of today, and never tomorrow. People went on TV and wrote long editorials about the death of American culture. It was all Dr. Spock's fault for encouraging permissiveness and an expectation of instant gratification.
Once upon a time the youth were called greasers ... beatniks ... flappers ... the list goes on.
So to the Millennials, welcome to the club. On behalf of history, I apologize. Promise me that in 30 years you won't write the same stories about the next generation?
In any case, it's not hard to build a gravity fountain for yourself, so long as there's a stream in a hill above where you want the fountain. I found several eHow descriptions of how to build one. It can be as simple as running a hose up the hillside, putting a wire mesh over the end, which you hold down on the stream bed with a couple of big rocks.
Or, the hedge maze fountain might use a hybrid system, where water is pumped up to a reservoir which feeds fountains at lower elevations. (The Grotte de Thétys supports one such reservoir for the gardens of Versailles.) Even without power, there can still be enough water and pressure to run the fountains for a while.
In addition, some fountains are hooked to the public water supply. In Basel there are public fountains seemingly everywhere, running continuously, and since many contain drinking water, it's not simply a pump recycling the water. In this case it would be the water company providing the pressure, not the maze's own pumps.
Perhaps you think it's wrong in modern usage. You can appeal to William Safire and insist on 'he', and I can appeal to sources ranging from 'Fowler's Modern English Usage' to Grammar Girl. Yippee. So let's test it out.
Here's a line from C. S. Lewis's "Voyage of the Dawn Treader": “She kept her head and kicked her shoes off, as everybody ought to do who falls into deep water in their clothes.” Do the "he" fans here serious think that should be ".. in his clothes"? I find the change from "her" to a "(gender-neutral) he" somewhat odd. (I believe this could replaced with "... one's clothes", but then 'everybody' should be changed to 'everyone'. Meh.)
But perhaps you insist that "he" is gender-neutral. What about "At the funeral, everyone was dressed to the nines, each wearing his nicest dress or swankest tie." or "Is it your brother or your sister who can hold his breath for four minutes?" Are you so sure now that he/his is gender neutral? (And using "one's" for the second case certainly doesn't work.)
I'll quote from "Motivated Grammar": You don’t have to use singular they yourself. You can go ahead and re-work your sentences to avoid it. You can employ he or she, or s/he, or a made-up gender-neutral pronoun of your own devising like xe. You can even just stubbornly plow on, using he as a gender-neutral pronoun until you grow tired of people pointing out that it isn’t really. I don’t care, and you’re not grammatically wrong. But you’re just making a fool of yourself when you go around telling users of singular they that they’re wrong, because they’re not.