Word: laughed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Although the "handbook" is a satirical attack at the preppy lifestyle. Birnbach said she is really "pro-preppy." She feels, however, that the preppies "have to laugh at themselves...
...Michelle, Marie Tifo is generous in body and spirit, a woman who likes to laugh and doesn't mind being laughed at. She takes what she needs and gives what she can, and expects no favors from anyone. She earns enough to pay for the roof over the heads of her brother and daughter, and to keep Guy in beer, but if she couldn't she wouldn't despair. She prefers to come up smiling (and what a wonderful smile she has); she guards no impenetrable depths; she revels in basic pleasures. Michelle seems unhappy only when faced with...
...course, the most interesting laugh is the one elicited by the truly bizarre mistake, because such a mistake seems to disclose a whole new world of logic and possibility, a deranged double for the life that is. What Lewis Carroll displayed through the lookingglass, verbal error also often displays by conjuring up ideas so supremely nutty that the laughter it evokes is sublime. The idea that Pepsi might actually bring one back from the grave encourages an entirely new view of experience. In such a view it is perfectly possible to lust after the Polish future, to watch the Tigers...
Still, beyond all this is another laugh entirely, that neither condemns, praises, ridicules nor conspires, but sees into the essential nature of a slip of the tongue and consequently sympathizes. After all, most human endeavor results in a slip of the something-the best-laid plans gone suddenly haywire by natural blunder: the chair, cake or painting that turns out not exactly as one imagined; the kiss or party that falls flat; the life that is not quite what one had in mind. Nothing is ever as dreamed...
...laugh at each other, perfect fools all, flustered by the mistake of our mortality. -By Roger Rosenblatt