Got Me Pegged?

For one of my classes this semester, my professor asked each of us to write a profile of another student. My classmate, Conor, had the task of writing about -- you guesssed it -- me. I found his assessment to be both funny and pretty accurate, and so I thought it would be fun to post the text of it here. I do have to say, acting as the subject of a piece certainly made me think differently about my own reporting! Thanks, Conor. Enjoy!

The Purple Prose of Tracy Bratten

By Conor Friedersdorf

On Sundays Ms. Tracy Bratten savors William Safire’s “On Language” column in the New York Times—“I quite enjoy his tone,” she confides—and her own language blog, Let’s Talk Nerdy, traffics in linguistic accidents. Consider a recent post that recalls a colleague’s inquiry about the difference between further and farther.

“These are the kinds of questions that make me tick,” Ms. Bratten mused.

Ms. Bratten’s pedantic quirk (which despite her habit of double entendre involves no facial twitching of her green eyes) is perhaps an unsurprising pleasure for an aspiring Manhattan journalist. She is a 25-year-old J-school student. Upon visiting the Museum of Modern Art she critiqued the prose of its placards. She once noted, “I'm not sure that there is anything that bothers me more than people who write ‘loose’ when they mean to write ‘lose.’”

Tick. Tick. Tick.

And boom! For the notion that Ms. Bratten is a Northeastern snob is quickly exploded by certain other pleasures seldom shared by linguistic pedants, among them her love of Longhorn football and the fact that she “craves red meat like a Texan who drinks Budweiser should.”

This last pleasure is the subject of another blog entry on Anheuser Busch, in which she quotes from memory the language that appears on the Budweiser label:

This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no brand produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood Aging produces a taste, a smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price.

Of this passage, Ms. Bratten writes that “It's a bit of a phenomenon, really, that three sentences could have such far-reaching - cult-like, even - implications. I am a loyal Budweiser aficionado, and therefore thought it necessary that I post a link to some great Budweiser literature.”

Ahem. “Great… literature?” As an experienced surveyor of beer cans and bottles alike, from Rolling Rock’s invocation of the “glass lined tanks of Old Latrobe” to the antique blue ribbon that Pabst has pathetically clung to since a county fair in the late 1800s, I submit that a sneakier passage doesn’t exist in the world of brew. The weasel words “we know of” begin it—perhaps Bud’s brew masters are conveniently ignorant?—and then there is the matter of calculations: as the American beer produced in the largest quantities of course more is spent on Budweiser than any other beer, but is it the most expensive to produce per 12 ounces?

That Ms. Bratten reproduces this passage uncritically on her language blog shouldn’t be taken as a sign that she is obtuse or careless—she is neither. Rather it underscores the reality that although she is a New York journalist-in-training, she also possesses a less ironic and cynical side, a more sentimental identity, a cultural outlook sometimes more Red State than Blue state, so that unlike most young journalists one meets these days she is a self-described conservative whose true hue doesn’t exist on the Fox News map, for it is a purple only slightly more red than blue, more denim than pinstripes.

“I root for the Astros and the Yankees,” she says, “and if they ever played in the World Series my heart would be torn. But I’d root for the Astros.”

On the other hand, although she likes country music and has performed dance steps from Texas-style line dancing to hip-hop, her preferred genre is tap, of which she writes, “Like English and Spanish, tap dance consists of words and phrases, patterns, truths and lies.” On some days, in some moods, she seems a purple slightly more blue than red.

Delve into her biography and it all fits.

She was born and raised in Houston to devoutly Christian mother (works with special needs kids) and father (builds custom McMansions). She came of age at the University of Texas at Austin, the bluest city in the Lone Star State, and among her friends she counts many from her home town who are now pregnant or already mothers, and many more from college who now live in New York City. The end product of this education: when she isn’t reading On Language she might well be engrossed in Harry Potter.

Is Tracy Bratten the bridge between Red and Blue America? Are her self-aware and yet unaffected cultural preferences the mark of some inner-strength and aesthetic independence the rest of us lack? These are the kinds of hyperbolic, inaccurately dichotomous questions one cannot imagine Tracy Bratten posing.

In fact, she has posed and answered them more elegantly in her own pedantic, folksy way on her blog, in an entry that sums up this profile better than any other.

“I am proud to be from Texas,” she writes. “Though I don't have a ‘country’ accent, as I was raised in the suburban metropolis that is Houston, I certainly appreciate the slow drawl and sharp twang that is indicative of many a Texan's Lone Star roots. ‘Y'all’ is part of my vocabulary, and I am not opposed to ‘ain't.’ I embraced such colloquialisms as "fixin' to" and such abbreviations as "prolly," though in my opinion it is only acceptable to adopt these gems of southern vernacular if and only if you are cognizant of the correct manner of speaking, in a manner of speaking. After all, would Picasso have been as successful in cubism if he had not first gained street cred by showing that he had raw artistic talent?”

Ultimately Tracy Bratten, through her language and her very life, calls us to eschew the false dichotomies of a so-called divided America by cultivating a more complicated understanding of those cultural attributes that are not our own. Prolly over an ice cold Bud.