He prefers to operate within a contemporary, middle-class context, playing a variety of "violently constrained Englishmen".
And in any informal, middle-class context, from office email to pub chat, non-standard usage will be noticed by standard speakers, who will judge that non-standard user to be at least unsophisticated, probably uneducated and very possibly a bit thick.
To see America's 1920s middle-class experience in context, it helps to consider how we think of the rest of the world today.
(Gautama is described as "an ordinary middle-class boy" in the context of his interest in a particular porn star, and Gwalior is described as "small" and "wretched" in the context of sati postcards. Not every middle-class boy is interested in Sunny Leone, and not every wretched place has a market where one can buy postcards of satis).
"The Binghamton and Niagara Falls sites," Zlotucha Kozub writes, "share a greater historical context demonstrating middle-class use of abortion for family planning in the 19th century.
"We had heard about these tiny houses in the media, but mostly in the context of middle-class Americans downsizing their lifestyle," Clemente told Al Jazeera.
The deeply troubling trend has been analyzed before - most powerfully in the Economic Policy Institute's biannual State of Working America reports - but the new study puts the middle-class decline in a metropolitan context.
Instead of relying on abstract statistical and demographic analysis, Banks was the first to read widely and judiciously in the diverse literary, pamphlet and newspaper sources of the Victorian era to produce a trilogy of studies of the motives and choices of middle-class individuals in their historical contexts.
A coterie of celebrated environmental prophets — Rachel Carson, David Brower, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich — had already established themselves, and Rome reminds us of the larger context: a suburbanizing, middle-class nation was increasingly aware of the outdoors and prepared to define liberalism in more than purely economic terms.
A section devoted to "The Goldbergs," the 1920's-to-50's radio-television show conceived by Gertrude Berg (who also played the irrepressible Molly), is presented in the context of a middle-class living room furnished with vintage radios and television sets broadcasting snatches of the programs.
A coterie of celebrated environmental prophets Rachel Carson, David Brower, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich had already established themselves, and Rome reminds us of the larger context: a suburbanizing, middle-class nation was increasingly aware of the outdoors and prepared to define liberalism in more than purely economic terms.
