[lit-ideas] Arts & Letters: On snobs

  • From: -tor <phatic@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: Lit Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Sun, 23 Apr 2017 23:14:25 +0200

If we tend to forget where we come from, here's a remedy: In a recent edition of Arts & Letters (daily) there's a link to a book review of D.J. Taylor's _New Book of Snobs_ (the title is derivative of William Makepeace Thackeray’s _The Book of Snobs_ (1848), where a snob is specified as someone 'who meanly admires mean things'). The review opens thusly:

The English writer William Golding (“Lord of the Flies”) had a longstanding sense of
social inadequacy. When he applied to Oxford University, the admissions interviewer
noted that he was “N.T.S.” — not top shelf.

Golding wrote that he would like to sneak up on Eton, the elite private school, as
if he were a cartoon villain, “with a mile or two of wire, a few hundred tons of
TNT and one of those plunger-detonating machines which makes the user feel like Jehovah.”

There’s no sting like a class sting. There’s a bit of Golding, an imagined
status-anarchist, in most of us. Who doesn’t hate snobs? Yet we’re all
snobs about some things.

To the late social theorist Pierre Bourdieu academic snobbishness is typified by the use of the kind of jargon that serves to indicate those who are 'in the know' from those who ain't. It is what he (Bourdieu, that is) referred to as _esoteric_ language use.

Trying to forget who it was that said that philosophy would do well to rid itself of jargon.


Best regards,
-tor

http://torgeirfjeld.wordpress.com/

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"It makes no difference to me at what point I begin, for I shall always come back again to this. It is necessary both to say and to think that being is; for it is possible that being is, and it is impossible that not-being is; this is what I bid thee ponder." -- The Goddess of Parmenides
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