OMG my parents are insane!

[flea]

Item one, an email just received from my mother. Subject: American Girl dolls.

Subject line: OMG the doll is fat!

Body: Borrowed an A.G. doll from next door. Can't say that I like her construction as all of her limbs wiggle loose. She will remind you of how very nice the Sashas' are. And, she is fat: absolutely porky in the arms, legs and torso. Truly the new American girl!
How can we influence Eve back to Sasha, or shall we trust that superiority will rise to the top.

Truly it is a wonder that her children did not develop eating disorders (our inherent tendency to be skinny probably saved us.) Also, no wonder we are all snobs.

Item two, my father is crazy too (or at least a prescriptivist, which as we all know = craxy)! From an email warning us about the rockslide between Asheville and Knoxville, he corrected my usage in the message he was replying to, like so:

> It sounds like [Hmmm: "AS IF", a conjunction, not preposition!] the afternoon/evening of Sunday the 27th is good to have an everyone gathering? Let's tentatively plan on that.

Yes, growing up with my father was like living with the English Police. Also, every time anyone said Florida or orange, he corrected her pronounciation (short o, not long!! Long is what those declasse people say!) I do speak very nice standard English, but I suspect I would have done so anyway without the continuous grammar shaming.

Memo to Teppy, your Chatty!Coworker's extreme literalism and general assy responses often remind me of my father. Who, I can say in all honesty, replies like that because he is an ass (said more nicely, he's a geek 12 year old boy), not because he has Asperger's or anything.

Comments

[jesseh.livejournal.com]

Wow.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

I've never seen an American Girl doll up close (I hate them on principle, from a great distance), but yes, that's insane. Sasha dolls have completely non-real proportions, especially if they're meant to be children.

The short-o thing cracks me up, because, who named Florida? Was it a snob in New England? No it was not. I got a lot less prescriptive-y when I realized that. I like the short-o as much as the next person with a big vowel vocabulary, but that doesn't mean it goes everywhere.

In sum: I do not feel nearly as crazy when I consider the influences under which I was raised.

[casperflea.livejournal.com]

I have seen it stated that Sasha dolls are designed to scale, 1/4 scale. A 16 inch Sasha if at 1/4 scale would be a 64 inch human, which is 5 foot 4, which is a teenager at a minumum. So that doesn't actually make a great deal of sense - they are clearly children. Actually, the oldest ones are 15 inch - they've "grown" over the course of the production. Anyway the Sashas do resemble an elementary school child (7-10) in proportion to me - Casper is very slim and limb-y at this point and will only become more so as she gets older. Not a younger kid, though. The AG dolls have a more traditional doll body, which IMO is more like a 3-5 year old in proportion (though the characters are meant to be ca. 10).

Oh god, now I'm going to have to go home and take waist and hip and all measurements of a Sasha doll and multiply them by 4. Sigh.

[veejane.livejournal.com]

Nerd alert!

The big Sasha dolls' heads seem completely out of proportion with their shoulders. And also, I mean, the male and female bodies are exactly the same, right? So they're not teenagers!

[nestra.livejournal.com]

How can we influence Eve back to Sasha, or shall we trust that superiority will rise to the top.

Whoa.

[holli.livejournal.com]

Gosh. there are a lot of reasons to dislike American Girl (although their continued support of Girls Inc. in the face of fundie boycotts is a point in their favor), but that? Is not one of them

[forodwaith.livejournal.com]

...whoo boy.

Fat is not what I'd call Nora's American Girl doll. Annoyingly perky & vaguely creepy, perhaps, but she's not even chubby! -- just straight up and down (like most little girls).

[burrell.livejournal.com]

AG dolls are not fat. In my head, AG dolls are the new Sasha dolls so it's funny that your mom is all "Sashas are clearly superior!"

What finally won me over to AG dolls is that you can read the books, etc, and enjoy them that way too. It's not JUST about spending an absurd sum of money on a doll (although that's certainly part of the allure, at least from the little girl's perspective).