Sprezzatura

There's a chapter in Freakonomics where they go through the process by which a first name moves from being classy to trashy. I don't remember much about it, because I read the book five years ago and absorbed little, but it always comes to mind whenever I see a football player with a double-barrelled surname. Time was, a double-barrelled surname was a surefire indicator of class. The landed gentry of this country would keep both their parents' surnames as a symbol of their various titles as people intermarried , and things could get very fucked up very quickly - check out how many titles and surnames belong to Richard Plantagenet Campbell Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville, 3rd Duke of Buckingham and Chandos for example. Rick's coat of arms needed 719 different quarters Now, though, the class association has diminished somewhat, since loads of people have parents who divorced/never married/didn't change surnames because they think it's a dumb tr...

I think I said in an earlier post that Gamergate was when everything fell apart. I was wrong. It was Atheism+. I'll be honest, this article is only tangentially about Atheism+, because I can't really begin to bring myself to read up on Internet drama from 6-7 years ago, let alone make you lot read it, but does anyone else even remember this shit? Or is it just me? I Let's backtrack a second. I'm not particularly religious. I make the odd reference to the Bible from time to time, and I say masha'allah and oxala too (at the end of the HSBC post , for example), but that's not because of strongly held beliefs - it's just the culture I was raised in. I think Quakers are pretty cool (they seem like the least problematic sect of Christianity at least, and we all love oats, sweets , and not going to war), and Laughing Stock is definitely the greatest album of all time; I suppose all this makes me culturally Christian, but you still won't catch me in c...