Word: quainted
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Formatted like a 19th century journal, with dense text and quaint line drawings, McSweeney's (whose print run is now up to 12,000) selects pieces too esoteric, untimely or otherwise uncommercial to make the glossies--experimental fiction, absurdist humor and erudite essays, like a piece on a War of 1812 veteran who believed the earth was hollow and contained habitable worlds within. Like the New Yorker before it became topical and buzz crazy, McSweeney's gives writers the time and space to indulge their interests...
Certainly, there is a case to be made for this. Honorifics are basically dead. The idea of agonizing over "Ms." seems quaint because the idea of calling anybody "Mister" or "Missus" or indeed anything other than "Hey, you" has faded away. Go into Abercrombie & Fitch, and the teenage sales clerks read your name off your credit card like you were both going to Riverdale High together...
There's no way around it. The longer hours and extra fuel are necessary in order, as one ambitious undergraduate put it, to max out one's opportunities. The occasional all-nighter--that quaint relic of the past--seems as pass as the typewriter...
...permit ourselves a divergence, of some thousands of miles, to Australia (that quaint, puzzling country that just voted overwhelmingly to keep their Queen), the Pauline Hanson phenomenon provides an illuminating analogy. Hanson--the red-headed fish-and-chip shop lady--shows what can happen to right-wing extremists unhinged from a main-stream party machine. Hanson came to fame in 1996 with her maiden speech in the House of Representatives, shattering the "political correctness" consensus of the last decade and rocketing herself to political infamy. She then went on to the form the (somewhat ironically titled) One Nation Party...
...Germany, my family lived in a quaint Bavarian hostel overlooking mountains which would impress even the Ricola house band. Each morning, we would sit to a breakfast of cereal with milk from a cow we could see through the window, bread with cheese made in the neighboring town and conversation topped with the mindless thumping of music from home. Our hosts, Christoph and Jutta, were warm country folk, with an agreeable predisposition to sausage and beer, but, alas, an ugly fetish for American music...