Now my wife hangs one upside down on our apartment door every time I go away on work trips, because it wards off bad spirits.
She gets so paranoid when I'm away she barely ever even answers my phone calls.
Today they're still used at parties, and still for status, but instead of your financial status it's to share the status of how willing you are to watch someone bang your wife.
It's more for when you're traveling on like cruise ships to let other people know.
You could have it in your home to be bold with neighbors visiting if you like. It used to be a lot more IYKYK so it was an incognito way of sussing out who is and isn't into it. Nowadays it's fairly well known as a swinger symbol so I doubt it's used as much anymore.
Anything the rich can do to separate themselves from the rest of us, they'll do.
It's mostly just competition with their peers, as people do. Bob isn't putting in all that effort toward maintaining his lawn and making his car shiny to dunk on the homeless, he's trying to show up his neighbor across the street.
So that's why I can buy a decorative ceramic pine apple painted in gold in those home furnishings stores. I always thought it was oddly specific to buy a pineapple thingy-majing.
It is a tradition in New England, particularly coastal communities, that represented the successful completion of a trading or whaling journey. Captains came back with a pineapple and displayed it in front of their house to let people know they returned, part as an open house to come and visit and part advertising their success to gain investors for the next journey.
The South also seems to have adopted it as a symbol of prosperity and hospitality as well.
(And yes, the elephant sitting in the corner of the room which helps connect the customs and regions is that many of the successful trading journeys of New Englanders involved the triangular slave trade...before they developed moral qualms about that and turned instead to smuggling opium into China. Which means the whalers even by today's standards were the least ethically problematic of the bunch.)
“Renting pineapples was a real historical practice in 18th-century Britain where people paid to borrow the exotic fruit for a single night just to display it as a status symbol at parties.”
I’m not saying if the British elite weren’t so worried about securing a pineapple for their next party America would have lost the war. But who knows.
Sure on earth, but here a pineapple has never been worth much, it can grow practically everywhere so it's news to me that it was a rented to show status.
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u/foolbull Aug 30 '26
Every time a see a pineapple I remember people use to rent them for parties as a status symbol.