No, no. I must be a historian. Or a numismatist. Or an art historian. Or Romanist. Or a Greco-Romanist. Oh wait. I’m employed — permanently — in a Classics department. I better get over myself and admit that for all my general ambivalence towards the word and its connotations that I really am a Classicist and this thus must really be a classics blog as it is about my professional life. [Really, very clearly this is not a food blog.]
This issue came up as I “discovered” [in the Christopher Columbus sense] that there are other bloggers out there. Hundreds [well dozens] all concerned about those pesky Greeks and Romans and their neighbors and what we do with them today. What fun!
What’s my hesitancy about the Classics label? Well, it is a label and I did have a good hippy-full childhood. [File under Freud.] Then there is the whole philology thing and given the learn disability with languages… [Just file under self-esteem and generalized anxiety.] Then add in the dissemination of the connotations of the word, a.k.a. ‘overuse’ for the purists. [File under ‘No, I don’t work on Jane Austin or MoTown or Model Ts’.]
Give me a while and I’d come up with a dozen more reasons. I am a Classicist after all.
The one thing I did notice in my peak into the blogosphere is that we classicists as a rule tend to take ourselves very seriously. I’m not sure that’s wholly necessary. It’s not like we’re working on something like this:
That is a random plug for just one of my NGO-employed friends. I just like to keep some perspective on my general relative impact.
On the upside, Classicists do seem to have a great sense of awe and wonder. That’s no bad thing.
Liv Mariah Yarrow 