Ferd Week continues with a comment left by Ferd, December, 2012, on the post, "Can you still be preppy if you......"
To our Southern friends,
Frat boys at Alabama football games in bow ties or, for that matter, anything aspirational in the South is simply a vulgarization of prep. Among the many appropriate attributes of pure prep is family history with Abolition in New England. It would be akin to calling a Russian in a Barbour a 'Brit" to calling one of these Southern gentlemen a prep. Any while we are on the subject, wearing Southern Tide or some other bastardization of pure prep clothing doesn't mean anything for your cause.
Ferd's response to comments:
After reading all of the remarks and reflections upon my historical inaccuracies and apparent lack of good taste, I am reminded of Oscar Wilde's take on enemies.
He observed "I choose my friends for their good looks, my acquaintances for their good characters, and my enemies for their intellects."
Accordingly, since it is so obviously clear that I have no enemies among you all (did I spell that correctly) permit me instead to thank all for their kind words.
Anent earlier remarks regarding Northern ante-bellum history I am astonished that none of my professors at Yale College or Princeton Graduate School (BA History; MA and PhD History) failed to mention any of this! I suppose I will revert and send my annual contributions to my prep school instead. Oh, the humanity!
And Ferd's response to responses on Ferd's response to comments:
Unaccustomed as I am to being a flagellant, it is with slight personal distress that I now venture once again into Muffy World.
Folks, you can't "be" a prep anymore than you can be a fire truck. To be, or not to be, is not your choice. The simple truth is that prep is a vicious intersection accident of breeding, birth place, wealth or former wealth and white Protestantism. If you are Asian, or African, Southern or Californian, Irish, French or Penguin you can't "be" prep no matter how many Land Rovers, Barbours and Alden full strap shoes you purchase. You are all poseurs. Look it up on line.
If you live on the Main Line your accent outs you. No true prep would host an OOOlive in her Martini, go hOOOOOme after golf or, God Forbid, approach such unrefined vacation spots as Avalon or Pocono Lake Preserve. Nobody who lives near Philadelphia is prep, sorry to burst your cheesesteak bubble. Being unusually vapid does not gain entrance to true prep, and there is no exit ramp from the PA Turnpike.
I believe that I have previously dispensed with you Southerns, but I am compelled to share just one more observation from that pinnacle of prep Winnie Churchill who observed that truth is something people occasionally stumble upon, ignore and than move on with their self-deceiving lives. Consider my earlier remarks your dose of truth.
So, as my final pearls before swine, listen up. If you read about, write about or think about what clothing, car, vacation spot, make up or underwear you own or want you can never be prep. To prep, these matters are effortlessly achieved without thought or choice. You may be whatever else you are, but you are not, inexpressively not, prep.
What's that I hear, I think someone is calling you about watching Alabama Spring Practice football over Mint Julies! Enjoy!
And Ferd's response to responses on Ferd's response to responses on Ferd's response to comments:
Sigh. One of the many tasks asked of us at prep school was to pay attention. [...], I did not ask you to look up the geographic relation of New England to prep. Instead, should you have the attention span necessary to do so, I asked you to look up the word 'poseur'. Res ipse.
As for [...] and the most recent anonymous genius, your enthusiasm dispels any possibility that you are prep or that you would recognize prep if it punched you in the nose. Writing of prep and Islam in the paragraph is heretical; writing these words in the same sentence is profoundly ignorant. And you know what they say about ignorance. Other than hydrogen, ignorance is the most common substance in the universe.
As for Southern schools of any type, the concept of prep is dead on arrival. There is an abiding indolence, a casual insouciance about Southern life that dissembles in the presence of pure prep. Perhaps more importantly, it is virtually impossible to wear sweaters in June in Georgia. One is reminded of a recent headmaster at Hotchiss who would attend pre-season football games in September in heavy corduroys, a Bean cotton turtleneck, a Shaggy Dog and Bean shoes (without chain tread, of course). He never broke out a sweat. Can one imagine this taking place in South Carolina? Preps not only do not sweat, they do not place themselves in environments where such inappropriate behavior might occur.
Won’t you all please just leave Muffy and I alone?
And finally...
Dear [...],
Mistakes are always forgivable, if one has the courage to admit them. I am spineless. I admit to nothing and deny everything. Besides, grammer is the slang of prigs who write blogs and other useless essays (excuse me George Eliot) ([...], you will have to look up George Eliot for I am certain that her name was not mentioned in any Southern finishing school).
This back and forth is like a high school reunion, such as I might imagine one to be. It is brutally boring.
But, in closing for the year (sorry fans of Ferd) just one more truth. Ivy League schools are the Antithesis of Prep, the anti-Christo if you will. It should surprise none that recent Yale undergraduates' effort to humilate their Harvard contemporaries included a video of two anxious Harvard freshman reading a blog entitled "How to Date [...]Women". I am not entirely happy sharing the following with all you Philistines but there remain only three institutions of higher learning on earth that are true prep. (Sorry, St. Lawrence, I said true prep not incrediably dumb, rich, drunk graduates of third rate boarding and day schools). They are, in no particular order of prepness: Bowdoin, Colby and Williams. I was tempted to include Amherst, but then there are problems there, aren't there? All other 'schools' are far too, how does one say this nicely, mainstreamed to be prep. If you are prep, you ain't goin to Brown any more, believe me.
He's right, true preps see right through us poseurs in 3 seconds. What is one to do? I, for one, am going out to buy a jet ski and have fun.
ReplyDeleteAlso, back in 1980, in response to the official preppy handbook, some of my hallmates at school were contemplating writing The Official Proletarian Handbook.
ReplyDeleteI wish I could spend a little time with this guy, sitting at a bar, nursing a bourbon with one of those huge ice cubes. It would be interesting, at least for one or two glasses of bourbon.
ReplyDeleteAvalon, New Jersey is a lovely place. Very wide sandy beaches backed by big dunes overgrown with shrubs, pine and seagrass. We've visited every summer since the year before my spouse and I got engaged. I agree, it's not the Maine coast, and it's not prep. However, the water temperature doesn't take my breath away, and walking along the beach in the a.m. with the breeze blowing through the dunes is pretty close to a perfect thing to do before the world fully wakes up.
While I would also love to spend time with Ferd at a bar, I wouldn't go within 100 miles of him with a Bourbon, or any other spirit, "on the rocks."
DeleteBourbon isn’t prep either.
DeleteIn the south they think bourbon is prep, thus proving that there's no such thing as southern prep.
DeleteI have known many displaced people who ended up in a strange situation, and in strange places. So they took their lifestyle with them. I just don’t understand how many people are disturbed and worried about who is who.
DeleteFerd is humor. There is it a bit of truth to it.
We just don't care what Northerners think of us. What we do think is amusing - is your constant obsession with us.
DeleteOh how I wish people would stop quoting or mentioning that stupid stupid book !
ReplyDeleteAfter reading Ferd, I feel like Tiny Tim peering wistfully into the unattainably expensive London toy store window in A Christmas Carol (the Alastair Sim version).
ReplyDeletePreach, Ferd! Preach!
ReplyDeleteAnother fabulous post! I'll be laughing for a while yet. Not prep here--right ethnic (WASP) and denomination (Episcopalian) but didn't come from the right place or enough money. I do have a Mayflower ancestor, though :-)
ReplyDeleteMost WASP's don't have money, anymore. If you are WASP, you are WASP. Period (and it's better than 'prep'. I hate that word).
DeleteMuch to agree with here (we can all pick and choose what we liked from Ferd’s Smorgasbord of beliefs.)
ReplyDeleteAnd it seems the truth did not set Ferd free, instead it transformed him into a modern version of Alceste - Moliere’s Misanthrope. Obviously, by the time he wrote these querulous observations, attacking others was second-nature to him, and he exhibited all the fearless impunity of a tenured-you-can’t-fire-me professor.
Was there a better side to the hidebound Ferd that appears here? I hope so. But we will never know.
Alas, I know Ferd quite well. Indeed, we are the same person. In response to your inquiry regarding a better side, the answer is no.
DeleteI suppose it's not Prep to be able to spell "Hotchkiss" correctly.
ReplyDeleteLots of very sensitive egos
ReplyDeleteYou think that's what it? Maybe the readers already know enough witty people who aren't cruel, and they don't find cruelty to be nearly as witty as people like you do. It's a bit like vulgar new money people behaving like boors, and it impresses people who get all their ideas about what it means to be rich by watching the Trump family.
DeleteAs an outsider looking in who knows nothing about being preppy, although I am amazed at how much the fashion of my youth was clearly influenced by it (I'm from across the pond) I will be glad when Ferd week is over!
ReplyDelete"Won’t you all please just leave Muffy and I alone?" How ironic that the next substantive words are that mistakes are forgivable. It was my experience that although they might have been forgivable, mistakes affected my grades. In later life, although they may have been forgivable, they still affect the way you are perceived. That is the objective truth for those who do not grasp the objective.
ReplyDeleteThe described intersection of factors that combine to produce a preppy as Ferd conceives one can be observed coalescing most anywhere.
Very well put
DeleteThis has been a hoot. Thank you for the laughs! Prost!
ReplyDeleteWhy does bourbon even exist!
ReplyDeleteReading "Ferd" has been great fun. Having decided to attend Stanford over Williams, I suppose that despite Stanford's culture, I had little in common with Ferd's true Prep! Our first American ancestor, John Braly Sr. was born in Ireland in 1720 to an English mother, who came to North Carolina and later served with Rowan County Regiment, NC Militia under Capt. George Davidson during the American Revolution. Many Bralys migrated West via wagon trains and settled across many territories such as Oklahoma and Texas, with our direct forebears continuing to Fresno, San Jose, and San Francisco, as documented in the book "The Bralys and the West" by David Braly.
ReplyDelete