Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7770907" data-attributes="member: 4937">Oh dear, save us from the pseudo-intellectuals.Do you mean for the English language, or just generally?  Because if you mean generally, I'm finding that statement a bit ridiculous.Are you seriously advancing an argument from the counter-factual as evidence?In the United States?  'Great Gatsby' or 'To Kill a Mockingbird'.   If I meet a stranger in a bar, I will assume that the works he's most certainly read are not the ones people read as a matter of taste or choice, but ones assigned to him in high school.  And 'Great Gatsby', 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Huckleberry Finn' and a few others are probably right up there with Shakespeare because well, that's what they make you read in high school.  In fact, 'To Kill a Mockingbird' might be a safer bet than Shakespeare, because which play or plays that they read probably depended on whether or not they were in an honors course, but everyone was made to read 'To Kill a Mockingbird' at some point.Popular culture as a phrase dates to at least 1825, and as I understand the concept the phrase meant pretty much what it means now.  I don't know what concept you are talking about, but popular culture has been around pretty much since the time society got sufficiently wealthy to stratify.  Seriously, stop wagging your credentials around like you can talk down to this crowd and get away with it.  We're not rubes, and you're not as sophisticated as you think you are.  You're talking like someone who has only a casual acquaintance with the subject matter involved, and as such are presenting it in the most unnuanced simplistic manner possible, like someone who read a magazine article on the subject and only partly remembers what was said.</blockquote>

Verification