Frontiers

This is a delightful article on American culture, which happens to be written by Judge Andrew Kleinfeld and his wife, psychologist Judith Kleinfeld. One of the best things I’ve read in a while. Here’s a taste:

For centuries those describing our social character have identified exuberant energy and spiritedness as the most distinctive trait among Americans. “The place is so alive.” “It makes you feel you can do so much more.” These are common expressions among visiting observers of all ideologies. Some individuals do not care for highly spirited people…. People who have a strong taste for order and hierarchy, who enjoy calm and quiet and leisure, who prefer security to risk, who take aesthetic pleasure in simplicity rather than in the bustling variety of human commerce—such people are not likely to enjoy America much. The British painter John Butler Yeats (the poet’s father) spent 15 years trying to be an American. “A sort of European old-maidishness gets between me and them,” he mourned. “Depend upon it, it is a mistake sometimes to have been too well brought up….”

In every language in which we have tested this, “frontier” means something nearly opposite to its American sense. The French Larousse gives only one meaning for and that is the border between two nations…. In Mandarin Chinese the term is bian jie or “boundary.…” During America’s expansion westward, frontier transformed into the very opposite of a boundary or limit. Its primary meaning in American English came to be a “boundless realm of possibility.” Indeed some foreign dictionaries call this meaning of “frontier” an “Americanism.”

Please, read the whole thing. (Thanks to Greg for the pointer.)