Only recently I discovered a Live Journal blog post from 2008:
This is normal. LJ is such a glitchy site that it’s a chore for me to maintain my own blog, let alone explore all those of other people whose comments interested me. On LJ I fail to visit blogs I follow for a year or two after they’ve ceased to exist. This in spite of the fact that keeping up with other people’s blogs—even if they don’t blog about glyphosate—is definitely part of any activist’s job description. Even if your purpose in using the Internet is just to sell things, communication needs to work in both directions.
Anyway: In 2008 we had the unprecedentd phenomnon of a presidential election featuring not one but two candidates who...
1…were extremely young by White House standards. The Presidency is generally regarded as the peak of a long successful career, which, however successful people’s early lives have been, generally happens after age 60. Younger Presidents are problematic. Their children are so young it’s cruel to subject them to White House life, they’re still subject to hormonal distractions, and if they’ve served two terms and still have thirty or forty years ahead of them, what do they have to look forward to? So it’s not ageism or generational prejudice that makes me say: Barack Obama and Sarah Palin are about my age, and in 2008 neither of them should have been a presidential candidate. (Palin was not technically a presidential candidate but, in view of McCain’s age, was consistently considered as one.) Yes, one of them won; he may regret that now.
2…were, to our national shame and my regret, “historic firsts” because one wasn’t male and the other was less than 50% White. We’ve had other Presidents of whose ancestry Hitler would not have approved, but they’ve all, except Obama, been legally White.
3…were, let us face it, high-powered, hard-charging individuals who obviously had to make an effort to seem “non-threatening” to TV watchers, and it didn’t always work. Classic Cholerics, though Obama can pass as Phlegmatic for short periods of time. People who like to look busy while taking a lot of breaks and keeping the office social life going would not want to work with either one of them. In among the legitimate concerns about their age could be heard all of the code phrases for “…works too hard and makes me look bad, so I haaate him/her.” Both Obama and Palin embodied our age group’s preppy ideal of sailing through life looking as unruffled as a swan, while, like the swan, working furiously below the surface and prepared to knock any challengers flat with one blow.
Some poor idjit was obviously feeling that kind of discomfort about Obama because, of all the things it was possible for reasonable people to have called Obama, he chose “uppity.”I’m not going to mention his name here, in case he has children.
He claimed he was using this word in its dictionary meaning. I’ve never owned a printed dictionary that acknowledged “uppity” as a word. If they had included “uppity” they would have flagged it as “slang” or “dialect,” but afaik none of them included it even as that.
But “uppity” is another word like “ain’t” and “ort.” They may not be in the dictionary but nobody has to look them up anyway. Everyone who hears them used knows what they mean.
“Ort,” in written English, is a word meaning a leftover piece of food. I tried reviving it in college. Nobody picked it up. However Americans feel about the food, they're comfortable with the word "leftovers," and recognize “ort” in spoken US English as a variant form of “ought.”
“Ain’t” started out as a variant form of “aren’t” but it stretched to include “isn’t” and “haven’t.” All of these contractions were considered slang, "incorrect" in written English, into the early twentieth century. "Aren't," "isn't," and "haven't" were then accepted as standard, while "ain't" continued to be disparaged as nonstandard. So does "amn't." It became "correct" to ask "Wasn't I?" and "Haven't I?" but grammarians still insist that we ask "Am I not?" where many people feel that "Ain't I?" would be more appropriate. I personally have no problem with "Aren't I?", and if the definition of correct English is based on what our best writers and speakers say, I'd accept "Ain't I?" on the authority of Sojourner Truth--but your teacher or editor may not.
And “uppity” means “I believe in a rigid social hierarchy, and I believe that person belongs on a lower level of it than I think person is acting appropriately for.” That’s not a thing Americans can comfortably say, so “uppity” is mostly printed as used in a sarcastic way, as in Vicki Leon’s studies of female achievers as Uppity Women of [insert historical era].
If and when we use "uppity" we probably should understand it to describe someone who understands that, philosophically speaking, the whole idea of a human hierarchy being anything more than a short-term way to organize a specific job is pretty ridiculous, but, if a hierarchy is formed, it should be based on merit, talent, achievement. And who then proceeds to demonstrate that per place in the hierarchy of a "meritocracy" is well above per critic's. Probably the best response to being criticized as "uppity" is to go out and get yourself elected President of the United States.
To use “uppity” to describe an undesirable quality of personality or charactr is to confsss, and prove, that you have that quality in abundance. By the barrel, by the yard, almost certainly much more than the other person may have.
This pollie said it, apparently with a straight face, about Obama. Glumph. I do believe that comment deserved some kind of trophy for tackiness.
“Uppity,” when it’s not clearly used to express admiration of achievement-against-all-odds, is a word that says much more to disparage the person saying it than it says about the person so described. In the United States, a politician who says it, or thinks it, needs to go home. The best thing to be said for that one is that he was probably thinking "uppity young man" more than "uppity Black man."
More people publicly made more purely nasty, purely personal comments about Palin but, in public at last, none of them called her “uppity.” Palin and her backers might have used that word in a snarky, Leon-referenced way. The blogger known as Ravan used it in a fine, American way.
To use “uppity” to describe an undesirable quality of personality or charactr is to confsss, and prove, that you have that quality in abundance. By the barrel, by the yard, almost certainly much more than the other person may have.
This pollie said it, apparently with a straight face, about Obama. Glumph. I do believe that comment deserved some kind of trophy for tackiness.
“Uppity,” when it’s not clearly used to express admiration of achievement-against-all-odds, is a word that says much more to disparage the person saying it than it says about the person so described. In the United States, a politician who says it, or thinks it, needs to go home. The best thing to be said for that one is that he was probably thinking "uppity young man" more than "uppity Black man."
More people publicly made more purely nasty, purely personal comments about Palin but, in public at last, none of them called her “uppity.” Palin and her backers might have used that word in a snarky, Leon-referenced way. The blogger known as Ravan used it in a fine, American way.
President Obama's greatest achievement may have been surviving eight years of drivel about being "the first African-American President" without publicly cracking his bland, "No Drama Obama" mask, but his doing that was an achievement against odds and a thoroughly American thing. We as a nation were, and still are, regarded by the decaying nations of the Old World as an Uppity Nation. And should we not be proud of it!
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