Via valued commenter Bill E Pilgrim, a clip of Jon Chait delivering the most devastating retort since Woody Allen produced Marshall McLuhan to silence a pompous blowhard in “Annie Hall.”
Burn, baybee. Buurrrrnnnn!
by Betty Cracker| 157 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Politics, Assholes, Pink Himalayan Salt, Technically True but Collectively Nonsense
Via valued commenter Bill E Pilgrim, a clip of Jon Chait delivering the most devastating retort since Woody Allen produced Marshall McLuhan to silence a pompous blowhard in “Annie Hall.”
Burn, baybee. Buurrrrnnnn!
Comments are closed.
different-church-lady
Well to be fair, the title of her 2010 column was technically true, but collectively nonsense.
raven
nooooooo, not again!
trollhattan
-Takes up smoking
-Celebratory smoke
-Quits smoking
Obamacare!
And thank you, brother Chait.
Baud
@raven:
2 of 3.
jl
Nice to see the style Mitt Romney pioneered in his last two debates with Obama is catching on with that crowd.
Betty Cracker
@raven: What, did someone already post it? If so, I missed it!
dmsilev
“Please proceed, McArdle.”
El Cid
The arrogant fucking idiot sits there and specifies a system in which the central cost of the market is removed — catastrophic care — and repeatedly describes it as “preserving the market“.
Oh, okay. She’s all for “market” systems in which the costs to private companies is borne by the public.
God damn do I hate our system of elevating idiots, dupes, liars, and skilled combinations of the three to not simply public commentary positions but to fetishized ‘deep thinker’ levels.
God damnit, in the same sound bite she describes a soshullization of cost as ‘the market’.
raven
@Betty Cracker: No, not it, just her. It’s cool, I should be ashamed that this is another person I have not read. Like “Sully”.
Gin & Tonic
@different-church-lady: To actually be fair, the column Chait quoted the title of *was* a robust (by her standards) argument against national health care. To quote one passage:
She, as Chait says, really *is* against national health care.
LanceThruster
@dmsilev:
Quantum physics Q: did the singlarity exand faster than the speed of light in the initial moments?
LanceThruster
@dmsilev:
Quantum physics Q: did the singlarity exand faster than the speed of light in the initial moments?
LanceThruster
@dmsilev:
Quantum physics Q: did the singlarity exand faster than the speed of light in the initial moments?
Baud
Oh, are we doing a physics chat again? I’m in.
Villago Delenda Est
BUUUUUURRRRN!
Bitch slap upside the head!
LanceThruster
@Baud:
Was looking for explanation for layman.
LanceThruster
Ignore the 3 parallel universe Qs.
schrodinger's cat
McCardle is not the only buffoon covering the economy. NewHour’s Paul Solmon gave air time to a debt scold and economic fear monger yesterday.
ETA: Does anyone take McCardle seriously?
Villago Delenda Est
The way she says “Mr. Chait says I’m against national health care, which is actually not true” is…bizarre…especially the pronunciation of the word “true”.
Good grief, that ball is going to need a passport because it will land in South America, Chait hit is so hard.
raven
You know the conversation last night about Deborah Blum and her writing about poison? It turns out her dad, Murray S. Blum, once came to out house to collect some of the lubbers in out yard!
Baud
@LanceThruster:
I can give you a layman’s explanation. If you want a correct explanation, however, you may want to wait for dmsilev.
Suzanne
It it really inappropriate how much I enjoy watching dumbasses get their comeuppance. Not quite third-level orgasm, but close.
Mike in NC
@El Cid:
Well at least we’re not putting them in elective office at the local, state, and federal levels where they can wreak even greater damage. Oh wait.
Botsplainer
@LanceThruster:
Yes, which is why it was a singularity.
I’m not a physicist (makes my head hurt), but I’ve wondered about whether the Big Bang is actually occurring right now, and that the visible universe is actually the region of space we are closest to (like the nearest pellets in a shotgun blast, or sparkly element from the explosion of a firework). I wonder if that’s what the red shift means at the extremes.
I’ve asked physicists if they thought that an observer in a galaxy at the edge of our observation sees nothing but space in the direction of travel, but they say no.
fuzz
@schrodinger’s cat:
I saw that too and thought it was a little weird. In fairness to PBS though I think they did mention a few times during the piece how this guy has been saying the same thing for years and been wrong.
I like the News Hour but always thought they covered international stories better than national ones. They really do a good job on Syria as an example, and covered Iraq and Afghanistan better than most, but at the same time they have Shields and Brooks. Still beats the alternative.
Ken
@LanceThruster:
Oh, I thought you were proposing three parallel universes, in one of which the singularity expanded more slowly than the speed of light, one in which it was faster, and one in which it expanded exactly at the speed of light. The obvious implications for the values of lambda and the cosmological constant are left as an exercise.
John Cole
I edited this post to add pink himalyan salt and technically true but collectively nonsense categories, as every McArgleBargle post should have.
Also too, that was amazing.
Ash Can
That poor thing is in way over her head. She needs to just disappear and get a job in a nice, anonymous mid-sized city as a paralegal or bank teller.
LanceThruster
@Baud:
(Repost) All are much appreciated.
LanceThruster
@Baud:
(Repost) All are much appreciated.
schrodinger's cat
@fuzz: Their economic coverage is fairly bad and giving this person air time gives him legitimacy.
Baud
@Botsplainer:
As I understand it, the Big Bang is the explanation for why we currently see the universe expanding. So I don’t think the Big Bang itself can be happening right now, at least as we conceive it.
dmsilev
@LanceThruster: Sort of. The technical term for what you’re asking about is ‘inflation’; there’s a decent Wikipedia article on the subject. ‘Faster than the speed of light’ is difficult to answer when the question is “how quickly is space-time expanding?”, but the most straightforward answer is yes.
Baud
@LanceThruster:
@LanceThruster:
Your universe is collapsing!
LanceThruster
@Baud:
I’ll keep my head down.
xD
dmsilev
@Baud: No, the Big Bang is over and done with (in this universe, at least). That’s the point when the entire mass/energy of the universe is concentrated in one tiny tiny little area. Subatomic particles like protons and electrons couldn’t exist at such high energy densities, never mind more complicated constructs like molecules or overly curious hairless apes.
Baud
@LanceThruster:
And now it’s down to one. Congrats!
draftmama
What really got my attention (having grown up in England and still talking hoity toity Queen’s English simply because I’m too old to change) is that she is trying to sound like an upper class English twit. This is bizarre….
cokane
this is the problem with mcmegan stupid and dissembling
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Three universes collapsed into one?
dmsilev
@draftmama: To be fair, she’s got the ‘upper class twit’ part of it down pat.
Baud
@schrodinger’s cat:
I hope for LanceThruster’s sake it doesn’t collapse further.
LanceThruster
2nd Q : In regards to an open or closed universe…if the simplified explanation is something came from nothing because nothing was unstable, couldn’t that same ‘hiccup’ occur again regardless of what happens to the mass after the atomic motion ceases.
Thx for theanswers and links btw.
trollhattan
@dmsilev:
Let’s line up some matchboxes and invite her to jump over. It’s only fair that we verify her twitnosity.
El Cid
Relax.
[Note — this has nothing to do with models of expansion relating to dark energy, etc.]
Betty Cracker
@John Cole: Thank you. I can’t keep all the damn tags straight and tend to over-rely on “Assholes” as my catch-all.
Baud
@draftmama:
To be fair, it seems that in the U.S. an English accent is taken as evidence of credibility.
LanceThruster
What brought this on was watching multiple episodes of “How the Universe Works. ‘
Suffern ACE
I completely missed the controversy that bill de Blasio ate pizza with utensils and Maureen Dowd is now obsessed with the way another democratic man eats. Not surprisingly, she likes him less because of it and hopes you’ll like him less too.
dmsilev
@LanceThruster: In principle yes. As I understand it (cosmology is really really not my field…), an additional ‘hiccup’ as you put it would result in a separate universe, or at least a section of the universe that is completely disconnected from this one (so whether or not you call it ‘separate’ is more semantics than anything else).
A lot of questions at that level are things we simply don’t have answers to and don’t have a good way of figuring out the answers. Observations of various things can give us hints of what was going on when the universe was very young, but we can’t see all the way back and we certainly can’t see back “before” (whatever that means…) the beginning.
schrodinger's cat
@Suffern ACE: NYT has another Democrat to beat up on, what fun!
/snark
Bill E Pilgrim
@Villago Delenda Est:
@draftmama:
It’s a Thurston Howell-style lockjaw, a classic US type. I’d never really heard her speak before this and that’s the first thing that struck me. Hers comes and goes a little but that’s what it is. There are various names for it, Locust Valley Lockjaw, Long Island Lockjaw, etc.
For me it just adds to the sense that she’s a Republican no matter what she claims she is, kind of a tribal marker, though that’s probably unfair to others since I’m know that there are people who grew up speaking that way who are not Republicans.
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev: I thought you were an experimentalist, I vaguely remember you mentioning a while back something about making ice-cream with liquid nitrogen for some open house?
cmorenc
@LanceThruster:
Supposedly the explanation is that although matter and energy, i.e. the stuff that occupies space are themselves limited to light-speed or below by relativity, space itself is not so bound. OK, that’s the explanation for why the space the singularity occupied could expand faster than the speed of light, but I still don’t get why the expansion of space doesn’t homogeneously expand the matter and space occuping it by an equal amount as it does so, thus being undetectable if you were within the singularity or any other portion of space since then. Although if space expands while objects in motion relative to one another within that space don’t, that means anything traveling between them will appear red-shifted to a lower frequency, even while arriving light at B from A will still appear from B to be moving at light-speed. GAAH! RUN AWAAAAY!
LanceThruster
Q3: absolute zero vs the cessation of a ll motion in the atom. Different things? Does no electron motion mean the atom collapses?
Baud
OT: Bill’s mention of Thurston Howell reminded me — the Professor has passed away.
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: I am, and that is indeed one of our standard party tricks.
trollhattan
@Ash Can:
She needs a sitcom titled “Touched by a Koch.” She’s touched, alright.
Baud
@cmorenc:
I don’t think it works that way. As space expands, the distance between objects expands along with it.
LanceThruster
@Baud:
Yeah, he could build a radio outta coconuts but he couldn’t patch a hole in the boat?
xD
Ruckus
@draftmama:
Well she does sound like a twit.
Not sure that it matters if she gets the upper class or English part down.
I really need to correct the above. She IS a twit.
SiubhanDuinne
@LanceThruster:
Duck and cover!
Baud
@dmsilev:
Solid state?
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev: What kind of experiments, Bose Einstein condensation? Low temp physics?
trollhattan
@schrodinger’s cat:
What, doesn’t everyone?
Am recalling the video of the dude starting his Weber with LOX. Good times.
GregB
@Baud:
And the actor who played Reuben Kincaid on the Partridge Family and one of the two surviving Munchkins from the Wizard of Oz. The last survivor was one of the Lollipop Guild actors.
trollhattan
@LanceThruster:
Calculating his Ginger/Maryanne time would be approximately zero on the mainland, why rush on fixin’ the Minnow?
Botsplainer
@cmorenc:
Hawking says that the reason for the unequal dispersement of matter is imperfections within the formation of space-time. The imperfections were minuscule, but the results dramatic.
dmsilev
@LanceThruster:
Ah, an easier question (ultra-low temperature is my field…). More precisely, absolute zero is when an atom, or a chunk of material, or whatever, is at its lowest-energy state. That means that overall, the atom isn’t moving. However, the ground state of an electron bound to a nucleus is actually “orbiting” at a finite distance. I use the quotation marks because you can’t really think of the electron as analogous to the moon circling the earth; instead, it’s this spread-out diffuse thing (the ‘wavefunction’) which surrounds the nucleus. For various reasons, the wavefunction doesn’t overlap the nucleus itself, but instead is generally a small distance away (about 5e-10 meters for hydrogen; other atoms have bigger electron clouds). So, even at absolute zero, the electrons don’t hit the nucleus.
LanceThruster
@trollhattan:
Now you’re talkin’!
xD
Baud
@GregB:
Jeez. Is there anyone who’s not dead?
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: Low-temperature physics. I take crystals of various types (mainly magnetic crystals), cool them down to within 0.02 degrees of absolute zero, and study what happens to their properties when we poke and prod them in various ways.
The main sort of thing we look at are Quantum phase transitions.
Baud
@dmsilev:
Who do they work?
Central Planning
@Baud:
I read Lawrence Krauss’ book “A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing”. He explains the universe expanding, and one of the other results is that in millions (billions?) of years from now, the expansion will make it look like (to a local observer on a planet) there is nothing else in the universe.
I highly recommend it for the kinds of discussions on this thread.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: Kirk Douglas, Olivia de Haviland and Luise Rainier.
Bill E Pilgrim
@dmsilev:
There’s a Rodney Dangerfield-style joke in there somewhere, but I’m not going to make it.
cmorenc
@Baud:
I think that’s exactly equivalent to what I said.
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
My Lord, that won’t be true for much longer.
Baud
@cmorenc:
I misread you then. Sorry.
different-church-lady
@Baud: Abe Vigoda.
gbear
@El Cid:
My own body has been way ahead of the curve on this one.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Me. I think. Let me check… Hmmm… Pulse, check; heartbeat, check;, respiration, check; brain function, uh oh.
Baud
@gbear:
Ha! Now you know you can blame it on the Higgs field….
And Obama, of course.
different-church-lady
@El Cid:
They say that like it’s a bad thing.
Baud
@Omnes Omnibus:
What? Did you go off and become a Republican?
gbear
@Baud: The Higgs field and pizza.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: Ouch.
schrodinger's cat
@Baud: Reading McCardle has that effect, is my guess.
Honus
@Baud: yeah, and Gilligan is gone from West Virginia, too.
Cervantes
@dmsilev:
Twit? Certainly. Upper class? Hardly. Her dad was a lobbyist for the construction industry in Manhattan — need I say more? — and her mom was a realtor.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Mickey Rooney, Shecky Greene and Sid Cesar
aimai
@Bill E Pilgrim: No its fake english. She’s been pretending to be english as far as spelling for a while.
LanceThruster
Thx to all. You’ve made my slower than light train ride much more interesting.
LanceThruster
Thx to all. You’ve made my slower than light train ride much more interesting.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@aimai: McArdle? To me it always sounded like some kind of speech impediment. What, or who, the hell is Peggy Noonan trying to sound like? I can never pin it down.
schrodinger's cat
@aimai: But why? Pretentious twit is pretentious.
schrodinger's cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: She sounds like a drunk.
dmsilev
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I think Peggy Noonan checked out of this reality a while ago. Trying to Mae sense of her is a waste of time.
Amir Khalid
Off topic. But it’s funny, I promise.
This BBC blog post about a Malaysian Internet meme was apparently blocked here from midnight to noon Thursday (Malaysian time) because someone feared it might hurt the Prime Minister’s fee-fees. Something he said about the price of kangkung (water spinach).
efroh
Here is the link to the entire debate, but I haven’t yet found when this fantastic burn occurs.
http://fora.tv/2014/01/15/Obamacare_Is_Now_Beyond_Rescue
I would love to see her response.
schrodinger's cat
@dmsilev: Your research sounds cool. Do you use the Ising model to understand the phase transitions?
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Dick Van Dyke, Rose Marie, Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman, Ann Morgan Guilbert, Betty White and, again, Carl Reiner.
The key to a long life, obviously, is doing a sitcom with Mary Tyler Moore.
schrodinger's cat
BTW I is eagerly awaiting the return of Sherlock, loves me the curly Batch!
MikeJ
@schrodinger’s cat: Already over and leaving me waiting for season 4.
Bill E Pilgrim
@aimai: I don’t know about her spelling but I don’t hear anything UK going on, it just sounds like a combination of the ubiquitous and much-debated “fry” in mild doses mixed with a very US-style upper class manner.
Warren Terra
It should be pointed out that a system in which “catastrophic coverage” is provided but there are no provisions for routine doctor visits and no coverage short of a catastrophe remains catastrophic for public health: people know they can’t afford medical care except when circumstance has left them utterly no choice but to get it, and so they won’t get check-ups, they won’t get screening such as pap smears and mammograms and the like, and they’ll resist seeing the doctor when they’re unwell but not in immediate fear of death. The suggestion is a salve to the consciences of the middle class that leaves the underclass with essentially no access to medical care except in cases of traumatic injury or direst emergency.
Felonius Monk
Nature abhors a vacuum — scientists have yet to find any evidence that there is even one atom of anything between McMegan’s earrings.
Anne Laurie
@Baud: Henry Kissinger and Dick Cheney.
As my Irish granny would say, “Heaven won’t have them, and hell doesn’t want them.”
dmsilev
@schrodinger’s cat: For some of our materials, yes the Ising model is the best way to understand them. The straight Ising model has been pretty well understood for a while, so we look at somewhat more complicated systems which are layered in top of the basic Ising structure (Transverse-field Ising model and Random-field Ising model are a couple that we’ve worked on). We also work with materials that have Heisenberg symmetry instead of Ising, generally again with some more complicated structure overlaying that basic assumption.
(Ising model is a mathematical model of atomic-scale magnets which says that they can only point in one of two directions, like a bar magnet that can only point north or south. Heisenberg spins can point in any direction they please. In between is what are called ‘xy’ spins, which are like a compass needle that can spin in a plane but can’t tilt up out of that plane. )
Betty Cracker
@schrodinger’s cat: Me too! My teenager is so impatient that she obtained bootlegged UK files. We tried to watch it on Chromecast, but it was maddeningly poor quality, so I gave up and decided to wait for the US release. The kiddo saw all three eps and is dying to spill spoilers, but so far we’ve kept her at bay…
Omnes Omnibus
@Bill E Pilgrim: I don’t hear any UK in her accent either.
dmbeaster
@LanceThruster:
No. Space expanded, which is not the same thing as moving.
The same issue exists now. As the furthest reaches of the visible universe, the cumulative expansion rate of the universe starts to exceed the speed of light. Portions of the universe beyond that limit can never be seen by us.
TS
@Gin & Tonic:
It’s the poors – they should just die rather than use up the healthcare that will allow the rich to do the trickle downing.
dmbeaster
@Botsplainer:
That is why the correct term is “visible universe.” The belief is that space is infinite, and that no matter where you are located, you would have the same view. Someone on the edge of our visible universe would have the same view we have — they would just be able to see portions of the universe that will be never be visible to us. Similarly, we see portions they can never see.
Another part of the misconception on this is thinking of the Big Bang as a point source. It can be thought of that way only as to the portion of the universe that is visible to us. If the universe is infinite, then space erupted everywhere in the Big Bang — not just one point source. We just can only see part of it.
? Martin
@schrodinger’s cat:
Unfortunately, her employers do.
ranchandsyrup
The McMeganesque perfection of that debate is that her side “won” 32% to 59%. They poll the audience on the “motion” and then whichever side has a larger percentage increase “wins”. So, she wins, math does not matter and the dumb swing/undecided voters are the ones that make all the difference. Initial vote was 16% – 51%.
Steeplejack
@Baud:
I’m not quite dead yet.
aimai
@Warren Terra: Yes, and 15 percent of an income which is almost nothing is still a lot of money. She also tossed that off. What I disliked themost about that tiny clip is the way she says what she is proposing is “progressive” –look, if you want to have a brutal system of nothing but catastrophic care for the majority of people (subsidized, presumably, because she basically admitted it would ahve to be) be honest about it. Its not progressive. Its not liberal. Its not even thoughtful. It is what it is: a terrible plan that is not health care at all but rather disaster reduction of a very feeble kind. But at least have the honesty of your so called convictions. That attempt to make this non-plan s ound like some kind of wise, reasoned, compromise between “the market” and “progressive” ideals was just so incredibly dishonest and manipulative it made me gag.
Cervantes
@efroh: The exchange came roughly half-way through the debate. Her response to Chait was simply to assert that her prior view had obviously been rendered inoperative by her own subsequent writing.
Omnes Omnibus
@aimai:
You are talking about McMegan; I think your expectation is unlikely to be fulfilled.
Anya
@draftmama: I remember reading one of her stupid posts about about the 08 election in the Atlantic and she was bragging (no other word for it) about how her mother is old money whose accent immediately establishes her class. I guess she grew up trying to copy her mother’s upper-class accent.
efroh
Thanks, Cervantes! Was able to find it with your help. It starts around 44:50 if anyone else wants to see it in context.
Omnes Omnibus
@Anya:
As much as I hate to defend her, if her mother had a particular accent, the fact that McMegan picked up the accent or aspects of it is a fairly normal thing.
mclaren
If only McArdle had quite blogging and started doing porn 10 years ago, we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
Villago Delenda Est
@Baud:
Dick Cheney.
Well, let’s put it this way. He’s animate. We’re pretty sure he’s undead.
Villago Delenda Est
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yes, but did she pick up the twit part from her mother? I’m fairly certain the deserting coward did.
Omnes Omnibus
@Villago Delenda Est: Sadly, Bar is a distant relation – fifth cousin sort of thing.
gwangung
@draftmama: Heh. This theatre post may be of relevance:
http://bittergertrude.com/2013/12/23/the-politics-of-accents/
Omnes Omnibus
@gwangung: Another thing about accents in the US – we have more in common with Germany than the UK. Accents are first regional and then class based.
Dexter's new approach
Some think tank should ‘score” her proposal. Because a huge % of healthcare cost would fall to the govt. A huge % of healthcare cost come from a tiny % of the population -catastrophic . We pay more than 15% of are income on average for the insurance component, not because they manage our care well or provide incentives for preventive health, because we know they don’t do that. So what is the point then of keeping the current mechanics in place under her plan?
She;s too dim to know she proposed an effective single payer system.
trollhattan
@mclaren:
She tried but, you know, the markets spoke. “NEIN, MEINE AUGEN!!!”
Omnes Omnibus
@trollhattan: Actually German pr0n opens doors that are best left closed.
SFAW
@Anya:
That narrows it down how, exactly?
Re: her accent: maybe my ears is shot, but she sounded more like the stereotypical Harvie (a/k/a Hahvahd student) than a Brit. Although the Hahvahd accent to which I refer probably had its heyday about 70 or 80 years ago.
But Hahvahd or faux Brit, she’s still a twit.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW:
Well, her stupid posts are different from her really stupid posts which are different from her idiotic posts.
ETA: She sounds like a lot of the people with whom I went to college.
Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn
“What does the universe have to do with it? You’re in Brooklyn! Brooklyn isn’t expanding!”
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
My condolences.
Is that why you’re in East Overshoe (or wherever in the North you are)? Trying to get away from
Nuevo AztlanTejas‘MuricaTexas?SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
First Bar, now this. Which deity did you piss off, to be in such predicaments?
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
Po-TAY-toe, Po-TAH-toe
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: Bar is a New Englander not a Texan. Here is the thing – a fairly small number of people came to the Massachusetts Bay Colony prior to 1640. If you connect one of those families, you connect with most of them. They intermarried for years. My grandmother was the first of her family to marry outside of the Puritans – 300 years after they got here.
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: Probably some Native American one. When you toss in the Pequod War and cheating NAs out portions of the Hamptons, there is some karma to work out.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
Yeah, I feel pretty stupid about that. Especially since I spend enough time in Maine, and since I’ve driven by Poppy and Bar’s place in Kennebunk (after his term, and before his idiot son was “elected”). Not close enough to see the M60s (yay, Saco!) of course.
But, once again, I find my stupidity rearing its ugly head. I blame Obama and Clinton.
SFAW
@Omnes Omnibus:
What the locals call a “mixed marriage.”
Omnes Omnibus
@SFAW: It’s fucking amazing. They moved from Salem to Concord to western New York without mixing a bit. In western NY, they mixed with folks from Connecticut (just like them – I have witches, accusers, judges, and clergy who objected to the trials in both groups). And then they went to WI.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Omnes Omnibus:
One of my maternal ancestors was William Bradford. I have a verified ancestor who fought in the American Revolution, so I could join the DAR if I really wanted to. And yet somehow that branch of the family ended up Papists.
MaryRC
@Bill E Pilgrim: Katherine Hepburn and Gloria Vanderbilt had a little Locust Valley lockjaw going on too, but for me the prime example has always been the blonde fiancee in the Rosalind Russell version of “Auntie Mame”. That woman’s jaw and neck muscles must have ached at the end of the day.
Batocchio
Damn, I need a cigarette after that.
Cervantes
@SFAW:
First, she does not sound even vaguely British.
Second, she went to Penn. (And then Chicago for grad. school.)
Third, you’re right, there is no “Harvard accent” any more.
Fourth, there is a Bostonian (or New England) version of English but it has nothing particular to do with Harvard.
Cervantes
@Studly Pantload, the emotionally unavailable unicorn:
When the world was younger, I explained (more or less) the notion of a Big Bang to a very particular six-year-old. Her reaction was to ask why her room was not expanding.
Howard Beale IV
@schrodinger’s cat: Sully takes McMeghan seriously.
Ecks
@schrodinger’s cat: Is that like four seasons in one day?
Jamey
Dat video!!1 Aaaah, I need a cigarette.
sy
Outsourcing your light work again, eh.
SFAW
@Cervantes:
Actually, there are about 5 or 6 (probably more) Boston-metro-area accents (“Hey Joey! You from Reveah? So ain’t I!”), but, as you say, hers resembles none of them.
Which is why I didn’t bring it up originally.
The Hahvahd accent is not one you find in Southie, Eastie, Hyde Pahk, Chelsea, Dot, Reveah, Meffud, or any other tribal sub-enclave in the area. It came from the preppie class, I believe, and sometimes reminds me of William F. Buckley (although he was a Yalie), and I guess is sort of a Mid-Atlantic accent.
Cervantes
@SFAW:
When Harvard still admitted a largely homogeneous class of undergraduates, they had a common social background and thus a common language. As you pointed out earlier, this hasn’t been true for more than fifty years.
Let’s not talk about Bill Buckley unless there’s a pressing need.
pseudonymous in nc
I had never heard McMuggins speak, and that’s a McGargle of an accent.
steverino
@SFAW:
George Plimpton
Barry
@Howard Beale IV: “Sully takes McMeghan seriously. ”
Didn’t Sullivan hire her for the Atlantic?
And give her her first break into the Real Big Boyz and Girlz Medya?