Word: ralph
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Ralph: Perfectly adequate, my pet. But something must have been bothering all the stewardi. None of them seemed able to smile much...
Wanda: You are missing yet another social trend, Ralph. A lot of them have decided to cut back on all the smiling. Other professionals, like lawyers and accountants, don't have to smile relentlessly for hours at a stretch. Why should flight attendants...
...Ralph: Let me get my coat off, dearest. I want to brace myself on the off chance that someone I love intends to launch a hearty feminist harangue. Am I about to hear that smiling is bad for women...
Wanda: Righto, Ralph. In her book The Managed Heart, Arlie Russell Hochschild says that the perpetually frozen smile of flight attendants is a classic bit of commercial manipulation that propels many of them into mini- breakdowns at the end of the trip. One flight attendant calls it "artificially created elation," the sort of thing that turns women into ticket-selling objects, not to mention flying bunnies...
...Away from descendant history. Running away from the past, into the future. Or away from the bad past anyway, the recent, misbegotten past, and into a better past, all mythy and sweetly vigorous, into that America where the future was full of endless possibility. Into an America where, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "The only sin is limitation...