Word: unfamiliarly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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When television's fictional Simpson family visited Brazil a few years ago, their customarily extravagant adventures caused consternation. In addition to encountering hordes of street children, oversexed infants and monkeys rampaging around Rio de Janeiro, Homer was kidnapped and Bart was eaten by a snake. Unfamiliar with the concept of satire, Brazilians went nuts. The Foreign Ministry wrote a letter to the show's network, Fox; tourism officials threatened to sue; and Cariocas (as Rio residents are known) protested that Americans knew nothing about what they call the Marvelous City...
...this is probably quite canny. There are two ways to think about change in this election, because neither candidate is asking to be re-elected. In one sense - the one the Republicans are sure to focus on at their convention in St. Paul next week - America is weighing the unfamiliar, unquantifiable change that is Obama. Electing a meteroic black man instead of a seasoned white man could have big consequences or few consequences; either way, no one knows because it has never been done. Obama prefers to focus on a more familiar kind of change, the cyclical dumping of incumbents...
...wanted the experience of being in London to wash over me with all its natural undulations, like the push and pull of a gentle tide. Unlike visiting, living somewhere demands a distinct kind of acculturation. It is an open-minded kind of tourism, an accepting stance toward unfamiliar expressions and the way people interact in the street, an openness to new subway maps and the way strange currency feels in your hand. You let these things enter your mind and you let them stay there, living with them as fixtures of life instead of quaint cultural differences that...
...darting in and out of the opposite lane is not at all unusual. And of course, I'm constantly reminded how far away from home I am when I can only understand pieces of conversation and see signs with familiar pictures of hot dogs and swimsuits but with unfamiliar text...
...term 'world music' suggests sounds that are esoteric and unfamiliar - neither of which applies to Ethiopiques, one of the hippest acts of the summer of 08 that recently played both London's high-tone Barbican theater and the rather more déclassé Glastonbury Festival. And even though the music is certainly not from round these parts, its hooks and grooves are ones any veteran soul-boy or jazzer can relate to: funky brass, swirling organ, growling sax, rippling congas, ecstatic vocals - this is not the sound of a national culture struggling to make itself heard over the global...