Ann Romney: ‘Our Struggles Have Not Been Financial’

[tblue37]

59. So now she says they have not struggled financially—but then what was all that BS

about using a fold-down ironing board as a dinner table and a board across sawhorses as a desk?

Oh, yeah—lies, just lies.

Besides, anyone who has ever done much real studying or writing at a desk knows that a board laid across sawhorses won’t cut it. It wouldn’t be stable enough for writing.

A board across two stacks of bricks might do for a desk (though I can think of better ways to fake a desk from cheap materials), and the same structure doubled or tripled will make a typical poor student bookshelf. But a board across sawhorses won’t make a usable desk.

As for the ironing board table—maybe they didn’t know what an ironing board was for, since their servants did all the ironing for them. Nah—it was just another blatant, ridiculous lie.

If you are going to iron your clothes on a surface with a cloth cover, the last thing you would want to risk would be the sort of drips and stains that eating could cause on that surface. Ironing boards have cloth covers, and it would not be easy to get food stains out of a cloth cover. You can’t just wipe that clean the way you would wipe a wooden or plastic table top clean!

Her fantasy version of how “you people” live when we are too poor to purchase the sort of furnishings more affluent people have is so unlikely that it just reeks of falsehood—and, even worse, of condescension.

And now she admits they have not struggled financially, which is essentially admitting that the whole starving newlywed students story was just so much made-up BS.

I teach college English. One thing I warn my students to avoid is making up hypothetical examples to illustrate or support their points. I tell them that if they really know their topic, they will usually have real examples to use, and if they don’t know the topic well enough to have real examples, then they run the risk of creating hypothetical examples that won’t ring true to people who do know the subject well. That happens because there will always be little details that someone who doesn’t really know the topic will inevitably screw up.

That’s not a 100% rule, since a writer who really does know a topic can create hypothetical examples that will ring true, but it’s at least a 99% rule for any but the most experienced and skillful writers.