Letters to the Editor
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A Large Vocabulary and Perspicacity Don't Always Go Hand-in-Hand....
In Buckley's time, memorization of the polysyllabic entries in Roget's Thesaurus might have impressed the intellectually lazy within the conservative movement as well as more left-leaning outsiders.
But his fulsome verbosity obscured the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of his politics.
In other words, his florid language merely served to hide the winded natterings of a right-wing asshole whose death happily eliminates a useless source of greenhouse gases.
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I myself would write in a similar celivagous slobberchops fashion...
But I cannot figure out how to get accent marks to appear over the letters in my fancy words.
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In Honor of His Passing...
...here is the debate from '69 when Chomsky handed his ass to him, then hoisted him by his own petard. Please notice who DIDN'T need a legal pad to keep track:
Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYlMEVTa-PI
Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9Samvw6Z08
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Good gods
"Back when looking things up was a chore"? Excuse me??
What a sad thing to say. I've always found looking up new words to be a delight, and far more so "back when" one had to do it with a dictionary rather than flipping around some website. As usual with books, there's not only the target you're looking to acquire (in this case, the word in question), but all the rest of the knowledge that moves before your eyes as you're searching. Often when looking up a word in my trusty Webster's, I'd catch sight of some other word, related or not, that would interest or enlighten me. Diving into a dictionary is not a "chore", it's more like a treasure hunt, yielding up unexpected goodies.
And it's also a sad commentary on these times that people are so perplexed by a word like "perspicacious". I think I knew that word by the time I was fourteen. But then, I did a hell of a lot of reading from the time I was a kid (not "age-appropriate" crap, but REAL books - the kind with adult level words in them), and that is really the only way to pick up a sizable vocabulary.
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Mnemonic Plague
Meritriciously Vehement Erudition Marks Counter-saturnalian's Jubilantly Urthic Polemical Eristication
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@Mister Marker
Thanks for posting those links. Fascinating discussion. What I found most interesting is watching these two very erudite men, from opposite ends of the political spectrum, discussing these issues in such a calm, polite manner, respectful of each other's style while still disagreeing on so much. It's rather disheartening to compare it with what passes for debate these days, so much of which is gross, ignorant and rude. To go from Buckley to O'Reilly, for example, just puts into sharp relief how political discourse has fallen. Imagine the likelihood of a debate of this sort being broadcast today!
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I myself like 'Chantpleur'
late middle French, it means to laugh and cry at the same time. Which is a lot like scanning the letters at Salon. Laughing at the fools and crying about the general stupidity of Americans.
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By the by
No one with a college degree should have to look up the last two of those three words. They're college level English words.
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On the Subject of Conservatism ...
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.
- John Kenneth Galbraith
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I don't know about erudition but here's a little aliteration...
What a windbag he was!
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mmckinl
Education comes from the barrel of a gun
-Mao
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Re: characterizing Buckley as a "wordy show-off"
Would you rather he talked down to you?
Buckley's vocabulary range exceeded that of most people. Whatever his politics, he thought extremely clearly and used exactly the right word to express the particular shade of meaning he needed. To do less--to censor himself because we, the unwashed masses, might not know what a word meant--would be insulting. Of his potential audience, some would not read him because they found him bewildering, some would read with perfect understanding, and some would read with the occasional reference to a dictionary. I fell into the latter category.
Further, Buckley felt this was part of his work ethic. In the article you link to, Buckley himself describes what he felt as his obligation in the course of his work:
But newspapers, in particular in one-paper cities, tend to acknowledge an obligation beyond merely reporting the news. The very idea of a ''feature,'' whether designed to advise (Ann Landers), amuse (Art Buchwald), satirize (G. B. Trudeau) or opine (the syndicated columnist) presupposes that the performer should use the full range of his relevant skills, even if the percentage of readers who turn to that feature is reduced. [emphasis mine]
He was not a show-off, he was himself, and unapologetically so. If all we read is only simplified, homogenized language, we will find it hard to escape simplified, homogenized thought.
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@ Serai1
Thank you for so perfectly expressing the joy of the dictionary. To your description I might add the joy of adding a new category of thought when you add a word. We're linguistic souls (even the mostly spatial types like myself), and having a new word or symbol attached to a concept immediately adds a tool we can use when thinking. This is why one of the first things repressive regimes do is burn the books and suppress the intellectuals.