Amara, Welcome to our dysfunctional family! S -----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Amara Rockar Sent: Tuesday, April 10, 2007 1:04 AM To: Anthony West Cc: UnivCity@list.purple.com Subject: Re: [UC] New voice in the anti-gentrification movement Hi everyone, I just subscribed to this listserve a week or so ago. I don't know anything about anyone but I did find it kind of funny that some of the people posting rants on the term "University City" were doing so on the "UnivCity" listserve. I did enjoy the history and trivia that has come out of this though! In my experience, the few times I've told someone I live in "West Philly" (when it wasn't just in the strictly geographic NESW sense) I always felt like an impostor putting on airs of hipness. I'm just a Spruce Hill-dwelling ucity dork. "University City" rings the most true to me in in terms who I am and where I'm living right now the same way it rings so false to others. My only other thought was that the people putting up the stickers risked a blacklash by putting up so many . Between 42nd and 44th on Walnut there were at least a half dozen stickers on the north side of the street alone. Maybe a bit much? Amara On 4/10/07, Anthony West <[EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > wrote: 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> http://www.purple.com/list.html >.
