"I choose to be a plain New Hampshire farmer with an income in cash of say a thousand (from say a publisher in New York City)." - Robert Frost
Monday, November 22, 2010
They're Everywhere!
Once when our office manager wanted to warn everyone of a threat in our parking lot (in the form of a low-hanging but large hive, dangling precarious from a tree), she sent around to the whole office an e-mail telling us to beware the wasps. In my typical mischievous way, I immediately responded to my boss that OMG she's right! We're surrounded by White Anglo-Saxon Protestants!
I originally hail from an old industrial region, one well-packed with immigrants from colorful places -- the kinds of people that proper society uses the term 'ethnic' to describe -- and indeed, I am descended from just such peoples. (Have you noted my funny, decidedly non-English name yet?) In fact, it was only after moving to New England that I actually met someone named 'Smith'. Of course I'd heard the name a billion times from history and on television, but while I'd known 'Schmidts', I'd never known a 'Smith' before. When I met my first Smith here - by now, I know several of them; this is New Hampshire, after all) -- I joked with him, asking if when he and his wife registered at a hotel as 'Mr. and Mrs. Smith', if they got dirty looks from the staff. American television is filled with lots of characters with bland, English names, but I can probably count on one hand all the Smiths, Joneses, Coopers, Greens, and Millers I knew growing up. DeMarzios, Przybilaks and McInerneys were dime-a-dozen where I come from, but English names were actually fairly unusual, something I didn't realize until I moved to still remarkably WASPy New England. Now, to be fair, New England's industrial centers have also attracted their share of immigrants so that Portuguese is as likely to be heard in Boston or Providence as English, but once you get away from the urban centers -- and in New Hampshire, that's easy to do -- you enter WASPland. Sort of reminds me of the ever-duplicating Agent Smith from the Matrix movies....
Labels:
anglo-saxon,
new hampshire,
wasp
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