Who, me?
In which we learn that Dawkins does not actually have fangs and a dripping cleaver.
To most observers, Dawkins is the textbook aggressive champion of evolutionary theory…In person, Dawkins fails to live up to the “aggressive” label…So he is genuinely puzzled by people calling him aggressive. “Well, I’m nothing like as aggressive as I’m portrayed. And I’m always being labelled ‘strident’. In the bestseller lists it always has a little one-line summary of the book, and for my new one it says ‘strident academic Richard Dawkins’. I’m forever saddled with this wretched adjective. I think I’m one of the most unstrident people in the world.”
Well don’t I know the feeling – though of course on a much smaller scale. I’m spared the thing about the bestseller list for example.
But in my tiny way, don’t I know the feeling. I’ve been called strident – I’ve even been called aggressive, though not all that often. I wouldn’t go as far as Dawkins…I wouldn’t say I think I’m one of the most unstrident people in the world, or one of the most unaggressive, either. I’m not that delusional. I am often verbally aggressive, often deliberately so. I am sometimes tooverbally aggressive – I’m apt to get irritable and impatient. (As does Dawkins – and if doesn’t know this about himself, that’s a little odd. I think his reputation for ferocity is wildly and unfairly exaggerated, for political reasons, but if he thinks he’s never waspish or hasty or sharp – he’s not thinking hard enough.)
But there is a difference (and a difference that matters – quite a lot, as a matter of fact) between being sometimes waspish or irritable or impatient or disputatious, and being aggressive or militant or mean or a bully. This has been part of the issue with Mooney and Kirshenbaum ever since last May – their willingness, not to say eagerness, to use hostile rhetoric to describe people who disagree with them. I don’t think people should do that. I think it’s unfair. I would even say it has a whiff of the bully about it.
Aggressive is not a dirty word or a bad attribute. I think you and Dawkins can be aggressive and that is OK, or even better than OK. You and Dawkins are always honest which can not be said for Mooney.
Sigh. I was just going to write a tiny post that said “I love the word waspish.” But I thought, first look it up to make sure you really know what it means. I knew all right, but my image has always been of a wasp, a flying thing with a stinger buzzing when it has been annoyed. It sounded like an old metaphor, back in the good old days when a bug could become a descriptor.
But the New Oxford English Dictionary that came loaded on my laptop says it only originated in the 1950s and comes from WASP, White Anglo Saxon Protestant. . . say it ain’t so.
I want to emphasize that I still like the word very much. And that I am not going to abandon my private image of an annoyed wasp w/a stinger.
Very sorry to break in, but there is hope (although I can’t find the sources) that waspish as peevish is indeed a very old usage.
Now I can sleep tonight.
One thing about Dawkins is that he expresses himself very clerly and concisely (and so does OB, btw). It is no accident that he holds the chair for the Public Understanding of Science.
Unlike f.ex. Mr. Mooney and Mr. Rosenau, Dawkins does not have to write lengthy essays to explain what he actually meant with his previous output. Even this recent “misunderstanding” by Mooney, Rosenau and Nisbet was cleared with a very short message.
Claire, look at most online dictionaries. They give the original meaning of waspish. The OED (my edition) gives, as its second meaning (the first pertains to wasps – real ones with wings): ‘Quick to resent any trifling injury or affront; irascible, petulently spiteful.’ Sometimes, within this defintion of the word, Ophelia is waspish for good reason.
And, while self-examination always a good idea, public confession is not. Yes, Ophelia, you are sometimes verbally aggressive. In my view, in the very quick exhanges of words that we find on the internet, that only last momentarily but may have long-term effects, a reasonable amount of aggressiveness is not only necessary sometimes, but also healthy.
Blogging, I think, is one place where a reasonable amount of aggression is required. I don’t think that polite, gentlemanly or ladylike periphrasis will do. Sometimes it’s better to be direct and to the point, robustly to the point if need be, especially where some kinds of speech need to be put down in order to maintain the order of the discussin as a whole. Permitting a Geoffrey Falk, for instance, to get away with his outrageous sexism and racism, without response, would make B&W a far less rich and rewarding experience. In fact, I daresay, allow too much of that, and some of us would take our leave.
So, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, is not necessary here, not at least to those, who, like me, find this a little oasis of sanity. Save it for the confessional.
Sometimes you have to be an asshole. I never understood the people who maintain that we should set an uneven playing field for ourselves at the get-go. When a creationist, for instance, is deliberately lying, blaming you for the holocaust, and claiming you have no morals and are going to hell, it would be entirely counterproductive to be polite to them and treat them like that’s a legitimate point of view. They’ll just take advantage of your misguided gentility.
That’s extraordinary about the New OED! That just sounds absolutely dead wrong to me – it doesn’t even make sense. Sheesh.
(If WASP were the source ‘waspish’ should mean something like elitist or snobbish or else dull and bland and prim. Oh it’s hopeless – they must have been on drugs that day.)
“In fact, I daresay, allow too much of that, and some of us would take our leave.”
That’s just it, actually. I know I leave places where there is too much time-wasting nonsense in the comments – even places I would otherwise read. You would think I could just, then, read the posts and ignore the comments – and to some extent I do, but mostly I prefer places with good posts and good comments. So, mindful of this, I try to keep the clutter to a minimum here. The trouble is…by the oddest coincidence in the world, the people who largely agree with me write MUCH BETTER THAN the people who don’t.
:- )
smijer is an exception to that, but he doesn’t comment here. I kind of wish he would, so that I could truthfully say “I do not either chase away everyone who disagrees with me!” He comments at Jerry Coyne’s though, and we have civil disagreements.
In the interest of full disclosure when I checked waspish in the New O Am Dict, I mistakenly only read the proper-noun-rooted entry Waspish. Which of course is “acting like a WASP,” that is, boring. I have been a little sleep-deprived lately.
All I could think was that the version of the New Oxford American Dictionary I got free was a stripped- down version that the Oxonians tinkered with so as to flatter (at worst) or not overly burden the minds of (at best) the few Americans who consult dictionaries. . . I could see William F Buckley sneering and over-pronouncing words, so totally not like a wasp.
But I checked again just now (still sleep deprived but a little more on the ball) and found lower-case waspish, with the proper definition. So I rescind my gossip about the dictionary. I am mortified.
I am probably on one of those lists of liberal linguists that los cristianistas can “adopt” to pray for: http://lc.org/media/9980/adopt_a_liberal.htm
(thanks to Amygdala for pointing it out).
Speaking of people who are intelligent and thoughtful and worth engaging with even when I consistently disagree with them, whatever happened to Merljin de Smit [sp?], I wonder?
Ohhhhhhh whew, what a relief about the dictionary.
Boggling the universe interferes with sleep! Heehee.
Merlijn is still around, somewhere – I saw some comments of his at Talking Philosophy not too long ago. I’ve wondered why he wandered away from here though…Maybe he is someone I’ve driven away. Hope not.
OB – hmm. I wouldn’t say ‘aggressive’, or even necessarily ‘waspish’. I’d say you were “direct”.
But then I’ve been an appalling kiss-ass lately… :-)
As popularly used, “strident” seems to mean “disagrees with what I and my friends think, and stubbornly refuses to do otherwise.” I find that the term “cynic” also means that in popular usage, with the connotation that the person is a real downer, to boot.
That said, there are times when secularists/rationalists can show unwarranted animosity for others, and that’s a mistake on many levels. I walked out of a “free thinkers” meeting in Naperville, IL years ago because some of the attendees were so mean-spirited. When someone alienates people that agree with most of their basic worldviews, they’re clearly doing something wrong.