it was safe to go back into the water, this SHOCKING news item appeared in today's Philadelphia Inquirer: Abnormally high NE temps (70 F) lured many people to public parks and shore towns, where they exchanged long pants and sensible shoes for shorts and flip-flops. Two teenagers went "downa shore" (Philly talk) to Ocean City, NJ, and went out on the beach. "Both teenagers," reported the reporter, "were barefoot." What IS this generation coming to?
It seems to me that the writer is pointing out that they are barefoot because it is surprisingly warm for winter weather, not because they think there is anything wrong with being barefoot at the beach. Can you post the article so that we can see the context?
At least the reporter passed reference! I mean, how often might shoelessness be an incidental detail that reporters choose to leave out of a story, so that readers never get to learn about it, did you ever wonder about that? I don't think people are going barefoot that much less than they did during the hippie times, but you can only build up a patchy idea from what gets shown and reported.
