Word: borrowings
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...school or town could absorb the mass killing of April 16 without scars. But as the students and townies here returned to classes and volleyball and walking their babies and dogs, they were, to borrow from a poet, "making the best of their way back to life/ And living people, and things they understand." Yet how strange to pass suddenly from the year-end thrill of a spirited campus to the horror of a mad gunman, to the glare of the global media and to blinking back toward something familiar. "And I don't think it's going...
Something you’ve always wanted to tell someone: Let me borrow that...
...great film critic Andrew Sarris once referred to the tendency of filmmakers to quote their own work as "self-reverential cinema." But Wright and Pegg borrow smartly from everyone else; why not from themselves? It thickens the parodic texture, gives a kick to their cultists; and besides, the jokes are funny. If American film-comedy writers have any sense, they'll start stealing from Hot Fuzz...
...however, we live in a mash-up world, where people - especially young people - feel free to borrow one another's cultural signifiers. In a now classic episode of Chappelle's Show, comic Dave Chappelle plays a blind, black white supremacist who inadvertently calls a carload of rap-listening white boys "niggers." The kids' reaction: "Did he just call us niggers? Awesome!" The country is, at least, more pop-culturally integrated - one nation under Jessica Alba, J. Lo and Harold & Kumar - and with that comes greater comfort in talking about differences...
...license to borrow terms other people have taken back can worry even edgy comics. A few months ago, I interviewed Silverman, who argued that her material was not racist but about racism (and I agree). But she added something that surprised me, coming from her: "I'm not saying 'I can say nigger because I'm liberal.' There is a certain aspect of that that I'm starting to get grossed out by. 'Oh, we're not racist...