I'd have to say that class insecurity and insecurity in general are very real to most people. American history has always been boom and bust, sometimes localized, sometimes nationwide. Sometimes government policies help, other times not. The problem is, the economy is not something that can be...
That women work in factories (rather than factory work is women's work) is no joke. I've never understood the logic behind the claim that women always stayed home while the men went out to work when the evidence to the contrary was everywhere. True, some women didn't but work was one area in...
It might be a matter of expectations. Some go into a situation expecting one thing and it turns out to be totally different. That generally applied to everything. While that might somehow make your tougher, it could just as easily make you bitter and resentful and I've met my share of people...
The past is never past. But not everyone is facing the same future. Some have a paved road with lots of help along the way. Others have a "tough row to hoe." Not sure how kids (high school, lets say) can have more responsibility these days and I have my doubts about the entertainment part. Some...
I understand what you are saying completely but there's another way to look at it.
Only a few generations ago, kids were never really "on their own" when they were young. They were part of the work force at home, in a manner of speaking, until they could somehow manage to leave. That was the...
I had mentioned the smell of juniper paneling in the beach cottage. Although the aroma was very distinctive upon first opening the cottage, it either quickly disappeared or one got used to it and stopped noticing it.
Someone mentioned the smell of an army supply room, sometimes present in a...
I don't know if I posted these memories before or not but if I did, maybe you didn't read it first time around.
The family used to have a cottage on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. It's been sold but my wife insisted on driving by it when we were there last. It was paneled on the inside with...
I'm not so sure it's hard t find a proper college, whatever proper might mean. The joke around here is that there's a college off every exit on the interstate, which is close to true. But when you finish college, you eventually realize that scarcely half of what you presumably learned had...
There are a surprising number of words and expressions that have been in use longer than we would guess. "People of color," for example, was in use by 1800. It's still an odd expression, just the same.
I didn't know of anyone who was an alcoholic when I was little and I don't think I ever heard the term then. But there were two men in particular who were drunks. They would go to their favorite tavern just over the hill or down the street, all of two or three blocks away--I don't think they...
Technically (or strictly speaking), the boots worn by the typical German soldier in WWII and well into the 1970s, too, by the way, were not jack boots. I'm not sure of the term they used, maybe just marching boots. Russian soldiers also used essentially the same sort of boot, although judging...
Well, they are, aren't they? But hooker is not a euphemism. It's a nickname. Well, maybe it is a sort of euphemism. "Camp follower" was an old term for the same thing, I think.
The shell shock story (and shell shock is not a euphemism in my book) is interesting. All the following terms...
Once upon a time many years ago, around ten o'clock at night, when I was about to leave an evening of folk dancing and go home, I happened to catch a radio program of organ music. It was the old WGMS station in Washington, DC, which disappeared from the air waves about ten years ago. After a...
My father was a WWII veteran and had also been a prisoner of war to boot. Yet I have no memory of us ever being at any event where we had to stand or salute or anything like that. Likewise, I don't remember him ever expressing his opinion about any of the things discussed here. But he was...
It is interesting that it has been pointed out that no one "owns" these various symbols of patriotic Americanism, though many claim to, to the exclusion of everyone else. It isn't so much that any group or anyone in particular is entirely wrong in their views, because things are a lot more...
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