Traditional dress and a p.s. on language

There was a pleasant surprise in the mail today. My sister, ever encouraging of my linkage* to my home country, sent a colorful little text on Polish folk culture.

From the point of view of an American, I suppose folk culture is quaintly foreign. I don’t even know what it means to recognize American folk culture – I would probably associate it with Woody Guthrie folk songs and Old World Wisconsin Outdoor Museum, though that’s a cheat since much of the folk traditions on display there are direct imports from European countries.

But for a Pole, folk culture has rich associations: it’s Highland music and dance, colorful religious processions, painted houses and wooden carvings. It’s sculptured gingerbread, thatched cottages and delicately designed Easter eggs. And it’s traditional regional dress.

You have no idea how much I loved my very own Polish outfit. I wore it at every opportunity – anytime you were asked to wear a costume or dress up, there I’d be, dressed in my full flowered skirt with a ribboned apron and my beaded vest over a starched cotton blouse with puffy sleeves. [The shoes were never quite right, but I’ve already posted about the odd shoe choices of my youth.] It was a long time before I understood that this was perhaps not what was expected for Halloween trick-or-treating.

I copied just one or two pictures of traditional dress from the Folk book and I appended my own photo from a 1959 party in Poland. It is a forerunner to the clash of cultures that was to be mine in a matter of months. My friend Janek is the cowboy. Me, I’m proud as anything to be in my own little heaven of  lustrously shiny beaded flowers and ribbons. Bliss.
 

* A famous blogger recently deplored the use of “linkage” and “signage” in everyday speech (here), arguing that they provide no additional benefit that would cause one to abandon the old stalwarts, links and signs. Having learned English later in life than 95% of the people reading this blog, I have to say that my hypersensitive-to-nuance understanding of it (fueled by the late-bloomer complex) leads me to respectfully disagree.  And I am using linkage here to exactly demonstrate my point. Linkage, to me,  bespeaks of a series, a system, with a common thread running through it. The same can be said of signage. It’s not just signs, it’s the signage in a given town or along a certain path. It’s the signage, not the pavement or the trees that grow by the roadside. This is a classic case of a word having an almost identical meaning but setting for you a different idea because of the context. In my sentence, nothing works as well as linkage – not links nor link. They would be okay, but linkage tells more – it emphasizes the system of links that I have to Poland. Or at least that is what my slow and shade-sensitive learning leads me to envision for the words under fire.

a display of color during a religious procession 

Polish wedding in the mountain town of Zakopane 

traditional dress: East meets West 

Happiness is less wealth and more leisure time

This morning the IHT (here) returns to one of my favorite comparisons between Europe and the United States: what is the value of leisure time on either side of the ocean?  
 
Europeans work shorter weeks and typically take two long vacation periods during the year (it is my impression that the summer one often extends upwards of a month). Yes, the reduced work time translates into reduced wages. On the average, Europeans are 30% poorer than their counterparts in the States. But it is a relative deprivation. Consider these points from the IHT article (boldface is mine):   

...This image of a casual West European work ethic tends to be viewed with something just short of scorn among the world's other wealthy economies…

… Is Europe, which has about the shortest workweeks and longest vacations in the world, doomed to lag behind, a victim of its penchant for ever more leisure and an overly generous welfare state?
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One response: If the answer is yes, then so what? 

Rather than a failure to catch up with its more industrious competitors because of faltering productivity growth, Europe's more modest income level mainly reflects a series of policy choices that have tended to put a premium on leisure and equality at the expense of greater wealth.
 
…But for all the bad press the European economy receives, it is so far not performing that poorly. 

…Contrary to conventional wisdom, West European productivity growth actually outpaced that of the United States over the past 30 years… Some countries, including France, now have productivity levels exceeding those in the United States.
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If Europeans are still poorer than their American counterparts, it is because fewer of them hold jobs, and those who do have gradually reduced the time they spend at work … Americans have been much more hesitant to work fewer hours, keeping the tally virtually unchanged over the past 10 years despite strong growth. The result: They [Americans] work 18 percent more hours than Europeans.
 
The Atlantic, it seems, separates two radically different philosophies of life.
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Polls show that Europeans are by and large happy to pay high taxes in return for social services, and anecdotal evidence suggests that the concept of well-being in Europe is less linked to material wealth than it is in America.
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"It's a different mentality," said Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
 
…Giuseppe Roma, who conducts society studies at the Rome-based research group Censis, said European shoppers were increasingly turning away from status-quo purchases to spend their money on lifestyle products. The new attitude, he said, is to care about the "real quality of life," meaning, I may not buy Prada, but I will buy organic olive oil.
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…According to surveys conducted by the World Database of Happiness, which is run by Ruut Veenhoven, a professor at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, citizens in many European nations are more satisfied with their lives than Americans and other more hard-working nations, like Japan, where people have been clocking up even more hours than in the United States. More significant, happiness in the United States and Japan has been flat over the past 30 years but has risen in most West European countries.
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…"The main difference with the U.S. is that we spend more time enjoying life," he said.