That's probably true.
Of course, the irony is that for those of us who experience "University
City" as a "derived bottom-up" name, being told we mustn't use the term, it
is verboten, because "it" means terrible things even if we don't mean
terrible things ... this sort of PC linguistic snobbery is being imposed top
down on us.
And it's a one-sided assault. Never have I seen anybody slap prohibitions
against calling a community "West Philadelphia" or "Walnut Hill" or
whatever. The advocates of "University City" have never, to my knowledge,
tried to discourage or belittle the use of other community names.
In other words, "top down" to you may be "bottom up" to me. It doesn't
matter that Stephen Foster, for instance, wrote "Camptown Races", and did so
with a marketing purpose; it's a folksong today. Neither does it matter that
"University City" had an author, and that he had a marketing purpose. If a
name survives for 40 years or more, it clearly caught the popular fancy at
some point. Today, it's just another popularly recognized name and it is as
legitimate as any other tag we call ourselves, or any part of our world, by.
-- Tony West
I agree with al and sharrieff and others about what's behind these
stickers, this question of naming. maybe another way of putting all this
is that it's a tension between having our identity being imposed top-down
or derived bottom-up. (ie, it's not a question of choosing to be on a
'side', but a question of how we see ourselves being empowered.) and this
applies to anyone who lives here, no matter how they do that, or how long
that's been, or how old they are.
----
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to the
list named "UnivCity." To unsubscribe or for archive information, see
<http://www.purple.com/list.html>.
