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Aligned with this week's theme; Bill sent me this--I was shocked. How dare a gov't. try something like this!
Sumptuary Laws. Many New England towns passed laws intended to prevent excesses in the areas of clothing and food consumption. Motivations in these instances were somewhat mixed. Part of the explanation can be found in the desire to prevent excessive human behavior. However, there was also an element of trying to keep people in their proper social stations. Fines were imposed on people on the lower rungs of society who dressed in silk or wore silver buckles on their shoes — perfectly acceptable practices for the upper classes.
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but, jackie, the clothes maketh the man--how could you know if the person you were speaking to was of your class except by the way he dressed? if a person dressed above their 'station' it was a sort of fraud or deceit. (and should be punished!)
the US is not totally classless, but it it much more so than many other cultures, but it wasn't always so, and we still have many remnants in our culture of class division.
in the past, there were all sort of rules about clothing..
'every stripe of person was there' is a old idiom. but it comes from laws that required criminals, mental defectives and members of religious minorities (often jews) to were striped clothing.. (now day, most criminal garb is orange jumpsuits, but cartoon images of prisoners still show them in stripes!)
Lace and just who could wear it, (and how much of it!) created crafts (and industries)--crochet is a famous example. crochet hooks had been used for eons to repair or darn clothing, but someone (repairing real lace no doubt!) realized you could create lace like (but not legally real lace) with crochet, and the craft took off.
(some what similar, designer drugs developed in responce to drug laws that name specific drugs.. designer drugs has similar effects, but technically were not 'outlawed')
the puritans were clothes conscious, they eskewed buttons (and only wore buckles) they held that buttons were too ostentatious, and they beleived in plain simple clothing, (but of course, it was less plain, less simple for the upperclasses!)
There was a PBS special on NY television 'a walking tour of queens" (part of series of walking tours of NY boroughs) and its mentioned that queens was home to some of the US's first 'planned communities'. it glossed over these communities were racist. No Catholics, No jews, No blacks. and many remained that way right up until civil rights legislation of the 1960!
segrigation was more open in the south, but it was just as common in part of the north, just better hidden. (and it was not just NYC planned communities that behaved this way, in many 'planned communities'a good deal of the 'plan' was to keep out 'undesirables'-see list above.
these are just 'extentions' of sumptuary laws. they are ways of 'defining' who is who in society.
go to your local blockbuster (or what ever) video store and rent a classic film 'genteman's agreement' a post WWII film about well, watch and see!
(i would like to be able to say, i am above all this, but alas, if find myself all the time bumping head on into prejudes i have acquied over the years.)
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Its' interesting what governments will do. Charlotte is the largest city in NC, and also one of the more dangerous places in the entire region. Believe it or not there have been over 450 carjackings, several of them resulting in fatal injuries to the car owner) in the last two years.
The Charlotte Observer ran a front page story about this problem a couple of weeks ago. On about page 8 there was a news report of an undercover sting operation involving seven or eight police officers that resulted in the arrest of three guys in their mid to late 20s. Their crime: running a fairly high-stakes poker game out of their home in a Charlotte suburb.
What in hell is a government doing wasting scarce police resources on victimliss crime for, when people are being shot to death so some cracker can take a joyride in their SUV?
I can only think this comes from the hardrock conservative Christian fear that someone, somewhere, just might be having fun.
TEd
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Wai, wai, wait a minute. You're not saying that these laws were just passed?
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Sumptuary Laws and Sumptuary Presumptions______________________________________________________ " What in hell is a government doing wasting scarce police resources on victimless crime for, when [our kind of] people are being shot to death so some cracker can take a joyride in their SUV?
I can only think this comes from the hardrock conservative Christian fear that someone, somewhere, just might be having fun." __________________________________________________________ But of course, TEd, is not being sumptuary. TEd is is simply being ironic. Right TEd? - Milum 
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Again, irony is *almost lost on the crowd. (Hey, Milum, you know how to create sock puppets; you've done several. But I'll remind you: when you're on your friend's computer, just log out of AWAD and log back in with the milum or whichever name you wish to use. Plus your password, of course. )
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>TEd is is simply being ironic. Right TEd?
Well, no.
TEd
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‘Cracker’? Do you mean ‘cracker’ in the derogatory sense that some black people use to refer to white people?
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Uh oh. Here I live in western NC and that term wasn't in my vocabulary. I was thinking crackhead.
Edited as follows:
This is from Wikipedia, and was the first thing I found when I googled "cracker pejorative" (without the quote marks of course.)
White cracker," or simply "cracker," was originally a pejorative term for a white person mainly used by blacks in the Southern United States, a usage that is now somewhat archaic. With the huge influx of new residents from the North, the term is now also used informally as a self-description by some white residents of Florida and Georgia ("Florida cracker" or "Georgia cracker") to indicate that their family has lived there for many generations.
As an insult, "cracker" was typically invoked against a white American, particularly (though not necessarily) lower-income, uneducated rural men in the South. The term did not have quite the extreme derisive power of the word "nigger," presumably due to the vastly lopsided social situation between southern whites and blacks when the term was common.
There are various theories about the origin of the term "cracker." The term has been traced to the 1760s, when it was used by the Earl of Dartmouth to refer to frontiersmen who were "great boasters." It may be derived from the Gaelic "craic," meaning "entertaining conversation." Other theories include references to the slavemaster term "whipcracker" and to the 18th century practice of cracking corn to make liquor.
In thinking about it I guess this probably was rather dimly in my vocabulary, but not my "working vocabulary."
I apologize to anyone I offended.
TEd
TEd
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the US is not totally classless,I dunno, of troy, many, many people have said we have no class! 
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Pooh-Bah
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Utopia ~ "Class Dismissed."  Well, that would be one element for sure!
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Deep down (and even not so deep down – all the way up to just below the very top, in fact) I really didn’t think you meant it in the pejorative sense, TEd. But I have never heard the term ‘cracker’ applied to people in any other way. Used in the pejorative, it didn’t make sense to me in the context, and so my question arose from confusion more than anything else.
I’ve never heard of cracking corn to make liquor, although I knew corn could be used to make liquor – ‘good corn liquor’ and all that. I wonder if the song ‘Jimmy Crack Corn’ (“Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care. Jimmy crack corn and I don’t care, ‘cause the master’s gone away.”) refers to making liquor?
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I had never heard of the Black Crackers. Neat!
Here in sunny(usually) Florida many people think that the term came from the early cattlemen's use of cracking whips to keep the herds together during cattle drives.
I recently heard a teenager express anger at being called a cracker, first I knew of that. Most of us whose families have been here a few generations take "cracker" to mean a native Floridian, of which there are quite a large minority.
Some think it a compliment, meaning that today's true crackers carry on the resourcefulness and uprightness of the pioneer settlers. I mean the real pioneers, not the land barons. Sometimes the "damn yankees" thought crackers were backward and somewhat shiftless, and some were, but not all. If anyone tried to insult me by calling me a cracker, it wouldn't work!
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An article on sumptuary laws in Roman times: http://makeashorterlink.com/?F3D32550AIt seems that despite his reputation nowadays, even Nero passed sumptuary laws. Bingley
Bingley
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