Paul FairieA Brief History of We Are Raising a Generation of Wimps
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If you enjoy these threads, you'll enjoy the book I'm writing (almost finished a complete draft!).
All about our repeated complaints (nobody wants to work anymore! men today are too feminine!), our tendency to blame everything bad on anything new (jazz! bicycles!) and all the other weird and interesting things (Cronk!) we put in our newspapers.
Pre-order here:
https://unbound.com/books/thepressgallery?utm_campaign=thepressgallery&utm_medium=AuthorSocial&utm_source=AuthorActivity
TotallyObvious 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🇺🇦🇵🇸@paulisci and on and on, ad nauseum. Thanks for this, I will buy your book. We need more folks like you willing to do the research to show that today's tropes do not uniquely belong to today.
Clay Bergen@paulisci hurray for a draft!
GJ Groothedde 🇪🇺@paulisci Interestingly, somewhere between 1971 and 1984 weaklings morphed into wimps. I wonder if this is a belated heritage of J. Wellington Wimpy?
Andy Wootton@Eetschrijver @paulisci Nope. In the 1960s my mother was warned by her brother that letting me play with a doll would make me "a sissy". This may have included Action Man.
@Eetschrijver @paulisci I think people now consider 'sissy' to have meant 'gay' but I think it was a synonym of "lilly-livered", "Mummy's boy" and "limp-wristed". Unmanly, effeminate rather than a sexual orientation. I'm sure it meant that too but nobody talked about that possibility in front of children, in case they caught it.
nev@paulisci I kind of wanted this to keep on going all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia
Cameron MacLeod
Iivana Lemmetyinen@paulisci I once went through a week of a single newspaper (Helsingin Sanomat, the biggest one in Finland) for a week in 1936.
That was hilarious. There was discussion whether technology will take away jobs or create new jobs, complaints how the police won't investigate bicycle thefts etc.
My favourite was that a Soviet spy ring was caught in Vienna, and Soviet embassy said that the arrested were in the country only as private persons.
Made in DNA@paulisci
I feel naked.
I feel naked.
Chewie@paulisci ive just pre-ordered it :)
@chewie awesome, thanks! 2-3 weeks away from handing in a complete draft to the publisher (though still edits to do after that)
@paulisci I remember hearing about some of the jazz quotes when I was watching the Ken Burns 'Jazz' DVDs where it said Jazz and marijuana use was going to ruin the youth of the 1930s... very similar to the moral outrage about raves and ecstasy in the 90s....
@chewie yes for sure! One fun thing about putting the book together is seeing the complaints about jazz next to the ones about bicycles, kids these days, the radio, Halley's Comet... We sure do complain about a lot
@paulisci any news on the publication date?
coldclimate@paulisci tremendous work
David Hull 胡大衛@paulisci I Beiieve it.
LiverpoolWiz@paulisci Great to see that the habit of not proof-reading was going strong then, whenever that was.
walter4096you're right "next generation is weak" is a recurring fallacy.
but by my reckoning this guy was 100% right about cars back in 1971.They've increased obesity & produce CO2.Now people are waiting for electric car rollout, when we've got bicycles.e-cars wont fix peoples health.
Definitely a balance to be struck between embracing progress and not just becoming weak.
I'm much more on the progress side usually(i'm very pro AI and we'll have the 'machines thinking for us' accusation..)