No, not languages. You’re a smart kid from Nowheresville who got into Harvard. You’re totally able to learn languages.
What you need to learn is languidity. Someone needs to demonstrate to you how to be swish, posh, and highborn, even though you went to public school in Akron. You will not get taken on at Cravath Swain if you can’t learn languid.
Languid is Algernon in Earnest; languid is George in Who’s Afraid; languid is Sir Walter Elliot in Persuasion, and Lady Utterwood in Heartbreak.
Languid in the real world is Gore Vidal, George Plimpton, and Lady Emily Lennox. All of these are your models. Or, you know.
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As pointed out by a number of defenders of legacy admissions, the overarching value in your going to Harvard among America’s aristocrats is that by watching them at close daily quarters you can learn how to throw off Akron and assume Cambridge (either England or America). You can learn to absorb upper class attributes, primary among them a steady unflappable sangfroid.
You come from the jumpy world that supplies COPS footage. You are going to need to scrub all of that and calm way the hell down.
A fellowship year in England will further refine your languidity and is highly recommended.
All of this does indeed constitute one of the few reasonable defenses of legacy admits you’ll encounter: Without a critical mass of uppers at the Ivies, America’s middles will have a harder time getting to the top.
July 12th, 2023 at 2:12PM
I sense you are a Posh Nosh buff, Dr. Soltan.
https://youtu.be/QuyUOpzAnXc?t=32
July 12th, 2023 at 2:46PM
Major LOL. “Louche and relaxed” is British for LANGUID.
July 12th, 2023 at 8:02PM
Tha louche/languid/relaxed triumvirate lead off the clip.
But to your point and in reference to a recent discussion, where else but at University do the American social classes mix? Where else could American Minty meet her Simon?
July 13th, 2023 at 3:40AM
Dmitry: I watched Posh Nosh again and you’re right – there’s my word “languid” front and center!
As to other non-university significant class mixing arenas – and not just in America (I’m thinking of that wonderful British film, Educating Rita) – there are fewer and fewer of these in the “recession of the elites” (I think this is Christopher Lasch’s term) into gated communities, expensive private schools, expensive forms of travel, “assortative mating,” etc. In his perceptive and hilarious book, Class, Paul Fussell calls U people the “upper out-of-sight.” For the most part, non-U’s simply never see U’s.
I suspect the only surviving big class mixing bowl is simply the great urban centers of our big cities – cafes in New York, the system of free museums in Washington DC… Places that don’t charge admission, in locations where at least some uppers still want to circulate on famous, chic, avenues.
But of course homelessness, addiction, and crime are undermining that as well.
July 14th, 2023 at 4:38PM
I think I fall more on the Hemingway side of the (perhaps apocryphal) debate about the rich. They’re not especially different from you and me, they just have more money. I suspect that the Vidal/Plimpton model of affected sangfroid is a 20th Century artifact and, in any event, was (and is) largely centered along the narrow corridor running from Philadelphia to Boston. I doubt that the U’s of Dallas or Los Angeles (even those educated at the Ivies) rate particularly high on the languid-o-meter. And the new generation of emerging U’s, the high tech billionaires, sound nothing like east coast fops, as hard as Bill Gates tries, bless his heart. Yeah, I know, old money vs. new money, but I just don’t see the children and grandchildren of the Zuckerbergs or the Arkansas Waltons summering in the Hamptons or even using summer as a verb. So I’m happy to see that kid from Akron attend Harvard without having to endure an entitled army of languid layabouts. If she’s ambitious enough to become a U, she and her kids will likely not have to act and dress like Thurston Howell III to be welcomed into the elite, perhaps not even in the northeast. Time to end legacy admits once and for all.
July 16th, 2023 at 9:22AM
TAFKAU: As my foreign, and 18th century, examples suggest, I don’t think languidity is as regional and obsolescent a phenom as you do. I’m thinking, for instance, of an Italian — Fulvia Morgana — who, although wholly fictive, embodies international U-languidity, with her uber-languid defense of her obscene aristocratic/material privileges even as she fancies herself a revolutionary voice of The People. David Lodge couldn’t make her such a successful object of satire if she weren’t in significant ways real.