I lived on Capitol Hill for five years, splitting my time between the Lincoln Park area of SE and the Union Station area of NE. I only moved away a few years ago, but the change in the local culture has been extraordinary. Maybe I just didn’t notice it before, but there’s an off-putting aura of pretense and pomposity that permeates the air, especially around Eastern Market. It’s like all the fashion-chasing trendsters who were too poor to buy a place in Dupont or Adams Morgan suddenly decided to migrate their herd to the Hill. I asked my friends who still live in the region if they noticed a change and they all agreed that the community was becoming a monochromatic melange of like-mindedness.

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I very rarely blog about political or cultural issues, but this commentary was so dead-on accurate that I just had to comment on it:

In a recent episode of Top Chef, the American cooking show I appear on, I complained about the other judges’ insistence on pronouncing ‘paella’ as ‘py-ay-a’. ‘You don’t say “Bar-the-lona” or “Me-hi-co”,’ I pointed out. ‘So why say ‘py-ay-a’?’ I thought this was fairly uncontroversial, but it was as if I had just produced a white hood and a burning cross. [...] the only people who take offence if you Anglicise foreign words are upper-middle-class Caucasian Americans. They imagine that other, less fortunate people will be insulted by your ‘imperialist’ attitude and they get offended on their behalf. In fact, to imagine that non-English-speakers are a poor, victimised group, requiring the protection of the American elite, is far more condescending than mispronouncing non-English words.

I don’t know why, but this is a huge pet peeve of mine. I’ve even had a similar conversation.

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