Idk about derogatory use; I’m not a fan of the word Sconnie, but it’s always been self-applied when I’ve heard it.

It’s more like a sample of 12 lunatics from those four places... I just thought to ask one of my coworkers who’s a transplant from Chicago, and she also says Illini but that comes with the caveat that she moved from the West Coast to go to school in Chicago, so she probably doesn’t count.

I have a couple of those junk drawers. At least once a year they get organized and I jettison enough of the crap that they look like Nick’s or Melissa’s, but inevitably after a month or two they end up looking like Claire’s. I have no regrets about this; I’ve adopted much better organization systems and given up on…

The people I know who call themselves Illini are from Chicago, Arlington Heights, and Decatur. A couple of the Chicagoans (that’s the word, right?) are connected with UIC, but the rest aren’t University Folk.  I’m sure it started with the University though.

I grew up calling myself a Wisconsinite, but the term Sconnie has been adopted around college towns in the last decade or two. If you’re lucky (or un-, depending on your taste in entertainment) you can see frat boys getting into fist fights over it.

Any idea when that would have changed? I don’t know that I’ve ever noticed a difference in flavor or texture, and I’ve been eating them for at least a couple of decades. It’s not unlikely, though, that my first Braeburns were grown locally.

No love for Braeburn? Braeburn are probably my second favorite eating apple (a phrase I picked up from some British cookbook or other), after Pink Lady. I’ve never had good luck with club apples; at Trader Joe’s I usually buy whichever interesting-looking variety I’ve never heard of before, and it turns out to be…

Look, I don't know what kind of comments you're expecting on this, but it's the end of 2018 and schadenfreude is all I have left.

Counterpoint: those of us who are me have eleven battery packs and only use one of them. We do not need any more battery packs.

[L]eave that song in the context where it belongs and get some better fucking music.

This comment feels you’re personally... attacking me? Catering to me? I dunno, but my fondness for They Might Be Giants is the hill I’m willing to die on. I don’t think I’ve ever said that on Kinja before.

Or just write better Christmas songs and let the crappy old ones die.

TBH, I wonder why somebody hasn’t already done this.

See, I read it as the man singing to the woman and the woman singing to everybody else.  But yeah, outside of its original context there’s no way to know that.  I think that’s my last word on the issue, though, because as I said at the top, I haaaaate this song, and I’ve suddenly found myself defending it.

I do wonder if the conversation should shift more to why people still love a song that’s irrelevant as hell

Accurate! The most positive way to read the song is that she’s taking charge of her own sexuality, but yeah, the guy’s first line should really be “well should I call you a cab? Because the roads are only gonna get worse.”

I mean, obviously I wasn’t there for any of the performances and obviously there don’t need to be any other party guests for the song to work, but the way it was described to me they did a lot of interaction with the audience to exaggerate the “look, we all know what’s going on here but let’s all be polite about it”…

My understanding is that Frank Loesser wrote the song to perform with his wife at parties, and that they would set the stage (i.e., get into character and hint at their intentions) before starting the song. I know it was used in a movie where the roles reverse halfway through the song, but I’ve never seen that version.

I agree with you on all of this. My point is that the song is not supposed to be about date rape. It is a slut-shaming song that perpetuates outmoded double standards, and that’s a perfectly fine reason to boycott it.

The difference is that Song of the South was always racially insensitive. Baby, It’s Cold Outside was never about date rape, but modern audiences have decided to read it that way. Song of the South is a victim of changing social norms while Baby, It's Cold Outside has been stripped of it's context and repurposed.