This is what I’ve been calling them all along: suckers and marks. Confidence artists don’t always exploit stupidity. Sometimes they prey on the greedy, the desperate, the vengeful, the grief-stricken, the compassionate. There are also some con games where everyone understands that it’s a grift but plays it through none-the-less.
Say what you will about the President*, he’s a natural-born con man with decades of experience and a family fortune behind him. During those same decades, the GOP was priming the pump for him.
Exactly - and in this case ‘mixed company’ means ‘plausibly includes yanks’, not gender-mixed.
Personally I dislike how widely they’re thrown around but I dislike even more the way Americans try to tell Brits what our language means.
An American was visiting London on business. In an office building he is frantically pressing the elevator button, as he is late for a meeting.
The British security guard goes to him “Is everything okay sir?”
The American goes “Your damn elevators are slow!”
The British security guard goes “No worries sir, it is a busy time of day. The lift will be here shortly.”
The American, at this point impatient goes: “Elevator, you idiot. I’m from America, and we invented the damn thing - it’s called an ELEVATOR.”
The British security guard simply smiles and says: “Very true, you did, sir. However, we invented the language, you see. As such, it is called a lift.”
Brit slang fascinates me. Words like cock, shit, and twat while crude are basically PG/PG-13 swears. Bastard on the other hand is considered a grave insult.
I don’t think that’s what I implied – I merely meant that in my experience the difference is recognized. There is no wrong connotation – only different ones. Like Twain said, we’re separated by a common language – but unfamiliarity definitely can cause confusion.
The “alpha/beta/gamma” thing may have been a helpful simplification when we were first trying to understand what was going on in high school, with cliques and outcasts and so on, but I agree that it’s not useful for serious understanding of large subgroups of a society. The incredible variety of people really makes it difficult to lump groups into categories. Some people might respond to empathy and understanding. Others only back down with strength. Some with a little of both. I think we’re going to need both strategies, and probably a few others. Implementing any of them isn’t going to be easy.
Trump was the first presidential candidate in our history to have spent a lifetime in sales and marketing. In selling things for more than their intrinsic value. He was always a serious threat to win for that reason, even when Democrats and Republicans alike dismissed him as a novelty candidate.
Nope. Too many examples to the contrary: Stephen Fry, Douglas Adams, Benny Hill, Are You Being Served,Monty Python’s Flying Circus… It may not always be humor we Yanks get easily, but Brits do have a sense of humor.
(I almost mentioned Craig Ferguson and Billy Connolly, but if I remember right they’re both Scots.)
