Bringing Sarcasm and Understatement to a Grateful World
I recently entertained some visitors from Colorado who, after a brief encounter with a local food service establishment, mentioned that they found New Englanders to be sarcastic. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I said disingenuously.
New Englanders are a strange mix of propriety, humorous subtext, and open aggression, especially in the face of anything they find pretentious or dishonest. Growing up in New England, I came to discover that you can get along pretty well by resorting to your Emily Post or Miss Manners, but that when people really began to like you, they will mock and tease you mercilessly. If a person is always polite to you, it is never a good sign.
Now that The Lace Reader has been sold in many countries around the world, I am beginning to interact with the various translators and I’m finding that 95% of their questions deal with sarcasm, self-effacing humor, and mocking understatements. Making translatable sense out of tongue-in-cheek remarks is challenging enough but even more so when a culture is devoid of multi-generational taunting. Do cultures like that really exist? If so, what do they do at family gatherings?
June 30th, 2008 at 7:57 pm
Hello Brunonia-
What a great website! I look forward to meeting you here at the Northshire Bookstore in Vermont on August 1. I’ve been telling our booksellers about your wonderful book, so we hope to have some fans here for you that day. Good luck with the tour!
June 30th, 2008 at 8:36 pm
Sarcasim is alive and well in most countries and cultures. Some people have no sense of humor and that’s a different issue. It is difficult to capture language and I’m sure the talented translators will do justice to the humor that keeps The Lace Reader such a wonderful read. Do you like soup?
June 30th, 2008 at 4:45 pm
I always get nervous when folks are polite and kind to me all the time.
I am much more comfortable around snarky commenters.
August 2nd, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Perhaps thirty years ago, Yankee Magazine revealed the evil seed hidden (or not so) in the souls of New Englanders, when it accused us of sanctimonious wood stacking and malicious zucchini giving.
(For those without a proper New England vegetable garden, consider what you’d do with the 25-lb zucchini-that-got-away when you finally discovered it…with a perfectly charming smile, you’d gift it to a neighbor.)
August 13th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
HiEvery other blog I have read about Booksellers, has been lacking in information. Your insight into Booksellers is sooooo much better than anything else I have read. Thanks Michelle