{"id":761,"date":"2003-11-08T16:08:15","date_gmt":"2003-11-08T20:08:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=761"},"modified":"2003-11-08T16:08:15","modified_gmt":"2003-11-08T20:08:15","slug":"barbarians-inside-the-gates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=761","title":{"rendered":"Barbarians inside the gates"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The reason I&#8217;m in New York is to profile Bob Silvers, who was one of the founders and is still one of the editors of the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nybooks.com\">New York Review of Books<\/a>. Yesterday I was talking to his cofounder, and co-editor, Barbara Epstein who is, I suppose, the ranking priestess of high culture in the <span class=\"caps\">USA.<\/span> She told me about the founding of the magazine: her then husband, Jason Epstein, she said, &#8220;was, like, kids, let&#8217;s put on a show&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n<p>I&#8217;m, like, oh my, Barbara!<\/p>\n\n<p>How long before the first foreign dictionaries start seriously conjugating &#8220;I&#8217;m like, he&#8217;s like&#8221; with the past form &#8220;I goes, she goes&#8221;, etc; the future tense, I suppose, is still based on &#8220;said&#8221;.<\/p>\n\n<p>I collect instances of &#8220;like oh my god&#8221; because it can be used to express so many different thoughts and emotions. I the buffyverse it comes on  rising inflection of hysteria, to express mild surprise. But last night, walking back to y hotel and listening to the conversations around me, I netted an entriely new variant. &#8220;I&#8217;m like <em>oh<\/em> my <em>God<\/em>&#8221; with equal weight given to &#8220;oh&#8221; and &#8220;God&#8221;, and both words pronounced on exactly the same low note, with a completely level inflection. This seemed to be expressing real desolation. I thought for some reason of a man coming home to find his basement flooded.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The reason I&#8217;m in New York is to profile Bob Silvers, who was one of the founders and is still one of the editors of the New York Review of Books. Yesterday I was talking to his cofounder, and co-editor, &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=761\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/?p=761\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thewormbook.com\/hlog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}