I was “place-dropping” and I didn’t even know it

Too funny. Remember when I wrote about the nekkid couple performing “Annie’s Song” on the beach last week? Well, the moment has been immortalized in Montreal’s The Gazette:

Proponents of place-dropping insist it’s less jarring than unprompted name-dropping because context is easier to find, or feign. The risk, of course, is that evoking far-flung places can make people with virgin passports feel at once envious and annoyed.

“The inevitable I-wanna-be-on-vacation factor makes the pretension harder to dismiss,” says Robert Lanham, bestselling author of three books on cultural foibles.

Lanham suggests the key to a successful place-drop is knowledge of which travel war-stories will help and which will hinder — something he carefully considered after stumbling upon a clothing-optional beach during a recent trip to Mexico.

“It’s not going to win me any favours to place-drop that ‘John Denver songs sure sound better when performed on a pan flute by leathery nudists in Tulum,’ ” says Lanham. “And yes, this happened.”

Rob and his wonderful wife Amy were vacationing with us. It was a relaxing and guffaw-filled getaway.

MORE: As a “bonus,” here’s a pic of the birthday-suited balladeers.  We called them the “Easy Riders” because they constantly walked back and forth on the beach like this…

RELATED: Props to Rob for getting a huge endorsement from Garrison Keillor last week (podcast reference starts at about 1:27).

Posted by Kevin K. on 03/20/10 at 04:33 PM • Permalink

Rob sounds like a funny guy!  Here is a link to the “Internet-Age Writing Syllabus and Course Overview” that they talked about at the link you posted.

It is very clever.  Hard to pick a favorite part but this was good:

Students will acquire the tools needed to make their tweets glimmer with a complete lack of forethought, their Facebook updates ring with self-importance, and their blog entries shimmer with literary pithiness. All without the restraints of writing in complete sentences. w00t! w00t! Throughout the course, a further paring down of the Hemingway/Stein school of minimalism will be emphasized, limiting the superfluous use of nouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, gerunds, and other literary pitfalls.

Right now I am BOSMKL.

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