The Opinionist

School clubs, I’ve realized, are breeding places for specialized lingo only accessible to those who share that manufactured social context. The strangest I’ve encountered is in Model UN, which I suppose is understandable due to its premise, but it is distinct enough to have its own name and actually set of rules—like a glossary—structured enough to even have significance in weighing a delegate’s performance. And Parliamentary Procedure is one of the most important characteristics of MUN that make it, definitionally, what it is over something else. We have grievances over the formalities and strange unspoken rules of speech—and rightfully so. Polite speech is that—polite, but can also be annoying, inefficient, and insincere. Corporate jargon is exhausting. And the general wishy-washiness and calculated language manipulation of politics is deliberately misleading. Under Nixon, William Zinsser writes in the classic writing how-to book, On Writing Well , was when “civilian casualties” bec...

Even three years after living in the country, every day I am forced to confront the fact that I still do not feel Chinese. There are less obvious signs of it—my pronunciation is better than most of my ABC friends who grew up here, many whose last visit to “the homeland” was years ago; I feel more comfortable speaking in Mandarin to my friends’ parents even over English; and the like. In China—one time in a very blue moon—I happened to score the highest points on a Chinese essay in my grade, and I still remember my classmates looking at me like a saint. In China I had done everything to qualify myself as “Chinese” enough by the standards of that culture. I completed my arc from an academic failure to getting into one of the best high schools in my city through the Zhongkao; I was taking an extracurricular class at the time on Chinese literature (a very rough translation of 古诗文, but I digress), which some of my classmates had not even heard of; sometimes they deemed me more Chinese than ...

  “Damn, babe, with all the makeup you bought, you could’ve already bought yourself a Ferrari.’ ‘Do you use makeup?’ ‘No.’ ‘Then where’s your Ferrari?’” Albert Einstein, apparently, wore the same outfit every day of the week to limit decision fatigue—saving all his brainpower for science. Once I envied this one-track drive for intellect. Now I just feel pity. Truthfully, the biggest lie that modern capitalism has sold us is that of minimalism. Albert Miner’s piece “Body Ritual Among the Nacimera” criticizes the American culture of obsession with appearance. And alongside “The Pink Plastic Flamingo: A Natural History” by Jennifer Price, it was only one of the several essays we have read this week criticizing that same quality, of flash over substance, a culture whose ostentatiousness was exactly the indicator of hollow nothing inside. The flamingo cannot be bright pink and flashy for its own purposes. We always seek to justify our desire—indeed our instinct—for visual aesthetics. We...