"[I]f the nobility start eating with forks, then before long the
gentry will too.Š"
If nobles do this, it's because they're nobles; if before long gentry
do it, it's because they aren't nobles.
>On Tuesday, June 03, 2003, at 01:55PM, Glenn A. Steinberg
><[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>[log in to unmask] wrote:
>>
>>> I too have struggled with this. As Jon Quitslund says, the problem with
>>> "cool," good though it is, is class: Gladys Brooks has a devastating little
>>> first ironic and then tragic poem about ghetto kids that starts "We real
>>> cool"--not what Castiglione had in mind, of course, even if one eliminates
>>> Brooks's irony....
>>
>>On the other hand, in the white, suburban high schools of my youth,
>>"cool" did
>>have class associations (if not quite Castiglione's). The "cool
>>kids" weren't
>>the poor or the minority students. They were the children of "the beautiful
>>people" -- perhaps the closest thing we have in the U.S. to
>>aristocrats. Being
>>"cool" back then meant being in a position not to have to care about anything
>>(since popularity, money, college admission, and future employment were all
>>secure) -- hence the sense of "careless ease" that characterized
>>those who were
>>"cool."
>
>Glenn, I suspect that even the "cool kids" didn't always feel that
>they were so but were probably imitating those they perceived as
>cooler than themselves. And that reminds me of Norbert Elias's
>model of the civilizing process and how manners and mores tend to
>migrate downward on the social scale; if the nobility start eating
>with forks, then before long the gentry will too, and so on.
>
>With that in mind, "cool" and "sprezzatura" may be alike not so much
>as identifiers of static social attitudes or registers (and various
>folks have mentioned how such a comparison could be misleading) but
>rather as tropes that describe social movement and imitation. The
>practitioners of both are acting as though they are better than they
>know themselves to be, and the humanist court and the high school
>hallway are both places of cascading perceptions where the
>successful imitators of this behavior are themselves imitated in
>turn. Pretty soon everyone's cool (I was going to add "or trying to
>be" but that would be redundant).
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