Maybe you're having a (perfectly understandable) inflammatory reaction to the state of the nation, too.
This. Also, I have known several near and dear who have had Roid Rage - it's quite entertaining when you realise what it is. Anyway, IMO, you have no need whatsoever for more concision. What you say is always worth listening to - your jaundiced and despairing viewpoint is perfectly understandable, though nobody who knows you at all would wish it on you. This too shall pass (we devoutly hope).
Sorry, I posted that before I saw russell's and nous's. nous: thanks for further link. I read the synopsis which refers to it tangentially, but will certainly follow up.
russell: I hear you. And I can only hope that a lot of other people reading the NYT are less subtle than you, and take the general theme of the piece (segregation by income and education) seriously when they may not have seen it in quite that way before. It's easier to be virtuous when your larder is full.
A truer word was never spoke.
So much fascinating info, thank you all! It's quite clear that my impression of the relevant southern states' educational standards was seriously out of date. I haven't yet read nous's Reichman link on CA higher education, but I will certainly do so - I'm particularly interested in the Humanities subsidising STEM aspect. The story about wearing a Mets hat to break the ice with "ordinary people" just makes me think of that Pulp song. You know the one.
russell, I think Common People is a brilliant song, but to me it describes a different phenomenon. The girl in it is acting as a tourist, sampling the ways and customs of an utterly foreign culture. It seems to me that the Mets hat thing is a way of trying to experience goodwill and a human connection between groups who may not have many other interests or passions in common (but who may find they do when they start to talk). I think it is like when people from completely different backgrounds and experiences love the same music, and can talk passionately and knowledgeably about it. The ability to do this, and to value it, seems to me to be a good thing.
What you say about the reason for the class based segregation makes plenty of sense, russell. I must say, I was very surprised by this: Research by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli has demonstrated that red states are now much more active than blue states in adopting new education reform ideas. As a result, red states are leaping out ahead when it comes to student performance. The biggest education story of the last few years has been the so-called Southern surge, the significant rise in test scores in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee.
I'd be interested to know whether this is a well known phenomenon - I had certainly never heard about it, but that's not particularly surprising I suppose.
wj, I think you underestimate the effect on the Russian people of seeing Putin treated like an honoured guest in America. However, neither Ubu nor Witkoff nor any of their stooges have enough knowledge about internal Russian politics to understand that. Not to mention there is symbolic value in keeping tyrants and aggressors as isolated as possible, out of the G7 etc. But of course, with Ubu as POTUS, expecting any such idea to have currency is hopeless. I like TonyP's Make America Decent Again, but can't see it happening anytime soon. I dread the Zelensky meeting on Monday, and I can't imagine how he must feel.
Side note on "smart" and "posh": Bryan Ferry is an interesting case. Working class, but attended that crucible of 60s upward (and other directions) mobility, art school. Fine Art degree, then teaching til music career. Clearly an aesthete by temperament (easily seen), he wears Savile Row suits and hunts to hounds (was married for 22 years to an upper class girl who hunted from the time she was 12). Of course this does not make him "posh", but really in today's world it's hard to miss his identification.
All this being said, it is good to be reminded that when I pronounce on "normal usage" in the UK, it is coming from a particular place of (as I said before) age, education and social class. I must remember this when giving such confident declarations in the future!
How fascinating, I have just looked up smart in the OED and the main usage for e.g. clothes seems to be "Attractively neat and stylish, relatively formal". It's true, I can imagine if someone asks what you think of an outfit, and you don't know them all that well and want to reassure them you might say "very smart", but generally speaking most people I know would use it in the way following, which is "Fashionable, elegant, sophisticated; belonging to or associated with fashionable or high society." Like so much else in UK English, it looks like it might be more class-coded than I realised.
And just before those two usages, despite what I have said before, the following: "Clever, intelligent, knowledgeable; capable, adept; quick at learning, responding intelligently to a situation, etc.; astute, shrewd; (of an action) characterized by cleverness or astuteness." In my experience this usage is rare here, although possibly more common as a result of American movies, literature etc.
Interestingly, none of you seem to be talking about "intelligent" as opposed to the other two words. It's hard for me to get my head round, because as I say "smart" is not often used that way here - except in the case of something like "street smarts".
I would say that most people in the UK who think about such things would think of "clever" and "intelligent" as almost synonyms, and that both (while frequently connected with education and knowledge) could possibly be present in exceptional people who have had almost no access to either, but who have what I think nous is calling "wits". And then, there are people who are particularly gifted in certain ways, for example with an innate understanding of mechanical (or spatial) processes. At least, that's how I understand the usual usage in the UK, but I may be extrapolating from my own and my (i.e. of age, education, social class) cohort's conception. nous's definitions @05.56 strike me more as something to do with personality, or turn of mind, rather than actual intellectual ability.
So maybe all our understanding of these terms is idiosyncratic....how fascinating this stuff is.
They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
Leaving the gilded age aside, I was interested in this comment of nous's. I recently had to explain that often, when English people said something was brilliant, we mean great, funny or marvellous in some way, as opposed to "brilliantly intelligent". So I'm very interested in "clever" v "smart", and either's relation to intelligence. We don't here use "smart" very much for that sort of meaning, in the UK it tends to mean something like posh (a smart address, a smart outfit etc). But, generally speaking, I don't think we distinguish much if at all between clever and intelligent. Am I right in thinking that nous means here to imply that "clever" is different from "intelligent"? And if so, how? Could it be something like "crafty", or "cunning"?
Trump is a vulgar clown, and his residence in Trump Tower reflects that. I don't care. Whatever floats his boat.
But that kind of garish, ostentatious display doesn't belong in one of the the physical seats of our national government.[Not to mention, of course, an historic building.]
God knows, I agree with that, and I have to admit that many of my tastes and attitudes are pretty snobbish. The Jantelagen aspect is also an interesting point. I realise I've never had any problem with mocking or criticising Ubu's taste at e.g. Mar a Lago, possibly because he's rich and fair game. I think it was the "Regional Car Dealership" thing that worried me.
Cheez Whiz: it wasn't so much the piece I was talking about (as I said I found it interesting and informative), as the reaction it (most particularly the coinage Regional Car Dealership Rococo) provoked in me. While it made me laugh, to me the name RCDR had an unmistakeable whiff of class (de haut en bas) contempt. But then again, maybe that's more just from an English viewpoint.
PS Maybe it's because such matters in the UK are so absolutely coded by social class, and awareness of that and its myriad disadvantages is impossible to avoid.
I enjoyed Cheez Whiz's link, which was interesting and informative. I laughed at Regional Car Dealership Rococo (it's perfect!), but it still left me obscurely uncomfortable.
Tempting and enjoyable as it can be to mock Trump, and his absurd and transparent pretensions, I couldn't shake the feeling that sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment. A sense of superiority, no matter how easily explained, always makes me question how justifiable such feelings are/can be.
I'm not preaching here - I've had to work out why I ended up feeling so uncomfortable after reading it and laughing, and this is just my first stab at trying to account for that feeling.
hsh: I agree. But I liked her take on it He begins telling me about how America’s biggest problem is “decades of mass immigration”. I point out that the US is, you know, a nation of immigrants, to which he responds: “It was originally founded by people of north-west European ancestry.” I note there were people there before them. “There were native Americans, and they lost out,” he replies. “Sucks for them.” This is an odd comment from the spokesperson of a party claiming one of its key beliefs to be that “indigenous people have an inseparable bond with their homeland and are its natural stewards” to make.
and particularly when she says this: Cave turns to me. “So what’s your skill then, spinning stuff into a story?”
“No,” I reply. “My skill is keeping a straight face when someone tells me something, and inside I’m thinking: fucking hell.”
A bunch of people I read were talking very enthusiastically about this piece by a FT journalist who went to a party for Curtis Yarvin and the "new, new right". It's reasonably insightful, and rather entertaining: https://archive.ph/qgC6d
Hmmm, I will take that under advisement in case new pillow number 2 fails. I didn't know about little back-sleeping ones, I assumed normal pillow size. Is your pillow the same size as a regular pillow?
What sort of pillow?
Michael, your story of the buckwheat hull pillow doesn't surprise me. As far as I can work it out, for back sleeping the desired position is to have one's neck fully supported but not raised, and one's head somewhat lower to the point where that is achieved. Those kinds of pillows can achieve that, if you wiggle your head into it just right, as indeed did very over-stuffed goosedown pillows for me for a long time. But I think (after 30 years or so) I am long past that. Now it has to be pillows filled with different kinds and resistances of foam and memory foam, contoured in various ways that are just right for one's particular needs. And it's often, as it has been for me now, a system of trial and error, where you have to try with a particular new pillow for several days to be sure whether or not it's any good.
Unfortunately, I am now a side sleeper, and I have never worked out exactly what the ideal combination is for that. New pillow number 1 professed to be for both back and side sleepers, and was weirdly and alarmingly contoured, but it only seems to be (reasonably) good for back sleeping. The jury is still out on new pillow number 2, but it means I am currently juggling 4 different pillows!
My new pillow arrived today. My fingers are majorly crossed. And for russell and Pro Bono too: may all our physical problems get better, since our political ones (Ubu, Gaza and Ukraine etc) show no immediate sign of doing so. Someone needs to find a way to enforce consequences or else we are in a de facto tyranny.
Absolutely right.
I reflected that Trump is firmly aligned on the side of Envy, Rapine, and Ignorance, and is, for the moment at least, triumphing over Truth and Learning.
Exactly right. But congratulations to your daughter, Pro Bono. It's an extraordinary and underappreciated achievement for them to keep going in those circumstances.
Agreed.
Charles, thanks for Creatine suggestion. Will look into it.
russell @01.08: definitely not too much info. It's one thing to understand something intellectually, and another to understand it viscerally.
Funnily enough, I have been grappling with a version of this for several weeks, not as a result of covid, but because of something that recurs every several years and is usually solved fast with a new and different orthopaedic pillow. The symptom is a lot of neck and shoulder pain, but the result is that I have been getting only pathetic amounts of sleep, usually only a few (3-4) hours in total a night, in several increments. I am continually exhausted, my brain is increasingly sluggish, and I'm now waiting in desperate hope for new pillow number 2. As I lie in bed, juggling three different orthopaedic pillows and trying a different position every few minutes (but never my preferred, natural sleeping position), I think about how a condition so apparently unserious can cause so much misery, and I think a lot about those people who have to live for years in constant pain from serious, intractable conditions, and how on earth they manage it. In my own judgement, I do not come out well from the comparison.
So I feel for you, russell, even more than I would normally. I didn't know that the new strains of covid could still have such effects. I only hope they end soon, and that afterwards your accustomed good health and fitness reasserts itself, and lasts for many more years.
On “Giving Away the Store”
Maybe you're having a (perfectly understandable) inflammatory reaction to the state of the nation, too.
This. Also, I have known several near and dear who have had Roid Rage - it's quite entertaining when you realise what it is. Anyway, IMO, you have no need whatsoever for more concision. What you say is always worth listening to - your jaundiced and despairing viewpoint is perfectly understandable, though nobody who knows you at all would wish it on you. This too shall pass (we devoutly hope).
"
Sorry, I posted that before I saw russell's and nous's. nous: thanks for further link. I read the synopsis which refers to it tangentially, but will certainly follow up.
russell: I hear you. And I can only hope that a lot of other people reading the NYT are less subtle than you, and take the general theme of the piece (segregation by income and education) seriously when they may not have seen it in quite that way before.
It's easier to be virtuous when your larder is full.
A truer word was never spoke.
"
Clarification: if it wasn't obvious, by "the ways and customs of an utterly foreign culture" I didn't mean Greek v English, I meant rich v poor.
"
So much fascinating info, thank you all! It's quite clear that my impression of the relevant southern states' educational standards was seriously out of date. I haven't yet read nous's Reichman link on CA higher education, but I will certainly do so - I'm particularly interested in the Humanities subsidising STEM aspect.
The story about wearing a Mets hat to break the ice with "ordinary people" just makes me think of that Pulp song. You know the one.
russell, I think Common People is a brilliant song, but to me it describes a different phenomenon. The girl in it is acting as a tourist, sampling the ways and customs of an utterly foreign culture. It seems to me that the Mets hat thing is a way of trying to experience goodwill and a human connection between groups who may not have many other interests or passions in common (but who may find they do when they start to talk). I think it is like when people from completely different backgrounds and experiences love the same music, and can talk passionately and knowledgeably about it. The ability to do this, and to value it, seems to me to be a good thing.
"
What you say about the reason for the class based segregation makes plenty of sense, russell. I must say, I was very surprised by this:
Research by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute’s Michael Petrilli has demonstrated that red states are now much more active than blue states in adopting new education reform ideas. As a result, red states are leaping out ahead when it comes to student performance. The biggest education story of the last few years has been the so-called Southern surge, the significant rise in test scores in states such as Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana and Tennessee.
I'd be interested to know whether this is a well known phenomenon - I had certainly never heard about it, but that's not particularly surprising I suppose.
"
OT, so a bit of a pivot back to class, but in this case class in America. David Brooks, on America's New Segregation:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/opinion/trump-democrats-resistance-reform.html?unlocked_article_code=1.ek8.T4vb.EoYRJkuNSb_8&smid=url-share
"
wj, I think you underestimate the effect on the Russian people of seeing Putin treated like an honoured guest in America. However, neither Ubu nor Witkoff nor any of their stooges have enough knowledge about internal Russian politics to understand that. Not to mention there is symbolic value in keeping tyrants and aggressors as isolated as possible, out of the G7 etc. But of course, with Ubu as POTUS, expecting any such idea to have currency is hopeless. I like TonyP's Make America Decent Again, but can't see it happening anytime soon. I dread the Zelensky meeting on Monday, and I can't imagine how he must feel.
"
Utterly enraging, and completely unsurprising.
On “A New Gilded Age”
Side note on "smart" and "posh": Bryan Ferry is an interesting case. Working class, but attended that crucible of 60s upward (and other directions) mobility, art school. Fine Art degree, then teaching til music career. Clearly an aesthete by temperament (easily seen), he wears Savile Row suits and hunts to hounds (was married for 22 years to an upper class girl who hunted from the time she was 12). Of course this does not make him "posh", but really in today's world it's hard to miss his identification.
All this being said, it is good to be reminded that when I pronounce on "normal usage" in the UK, it is coming from a particular place of (as I said before) age, education and social class. I must remember this when giving such confident declarations in the future!
"
How fascinating, I have just looked up smart in the OED and the main usage for e.g. clothes seems to be "Attractively neat and stylish, relatively formal". It's true, I can imagine if someone asks what you think of an outfit, and you don't know them all that well and want to reassure them you might say "very smart", but generally speaking most people I know would use it in the way following, which is "Fashionable, elegant, sophisticated; belonging to or associated with fashionable or high society." Like so much else in UK English, it looks like it might be more class-coded than I realised.
And just before those two usages, despite what I have said before, the following: "Clever, intelligent, knowledgeable; capable, adept; quick at learning, responding intelligently to a situation, etc.; astute, shrewd; (of an action) characterized by cleverness or astuteness." In my experience this usage is rare here, although possibly more common as a result of American movies, literature etc.
"
Interestingly, none of you seem to be talking about "intelligent" as opposed to the other two words. It's hard for me to get my head round, because as I say "smart" is not often used that way here - except in the case of something like "street smarts".
I would say that most people in the UK who think about such things would think of "clever" and "intelligent" as almost synonyms, and that both (while frequently connected with education and knowledge) could possibly be present in exceptional people who have had almost no access to either, but who have what I think nous is calling "wits". And then, there are people who are particularly gifted in certain ways, for example with an innate understanding of mechanical (or spatial) processes. At least, that's how I understand the usual usage in the UK, but I may be extrapolating from my own and my (i.e. of age, education, social class) cohort's conception. nous's definitions @05.56 strike me more as something to do with personality, or turn of mind, rather than actual intellectual ability.
So maybe all our understanding of these terms is idiosyncratic....how fascinating this stuff is.
"
They would rather be clever than smart, and they relished the idea of their cleverness winning over their customer's intelligence.
Leaving the gilded age aside, I was interested in this comment of nous's. I recently had to explain that often, when English people said something was brilliant, we mean great, funny or marvellous in some way, as opposed to "brilliantly intelligent". So I'm very interested in "clever" v "smart", and either's relation to intelligence. We don't here use "smart" very much for that sort of meaning, in the UK it tends to mean something like posh (a smart address, a smart outfit etc). But, generally speaking, I don't think we distinguish much if at all between clever and intelligent. Am I right in thinking that nous means here to imply that "clever" is different from "intelligent"? And if so, how? Could it be something like "crafty", or "cunning"?
"
Trump is a vulgar clown, and his residence in Trump Tower reflects that. I don't care. Whatever floats his boat.
But that kind of garish, ostentatious display doesn't belong in one of the the physical seats of our national government.[Not to mention, of course, an historic building.]
God knows, I agree with that, and I have to admit that many of my tastes and attitudes are pretty snobbish. The Jantelagen aspect is also an interesting point. I realise I've never had any problem with mocking or criticising Ubu's taste at e.g. Mar a Lago, possibly because he's rich and fair game. I think it was the "Regional Car Dealership" thing that worried me.
"
Cheez Whiz: it wasn't so much the piece I was talking about (as I said I found it interesting and informative), as the reaction it (most particularly the coinage Regional Car Dealership Rococo) provoked in me. While it made me laugh, to me the name RCDR had an unmistakeable whiff of class (de haut en bas) contempt. But then again, maybe that's more just from an English viewpoint.
"
PS Maybe it's because such matters in the UK are so absolutely coded by social class, and awareness of that and its myriad disadvantages is impossible to avoid.
"
I enjoyed Cheez Whiz's link, which was interesting and informative. I laughed at Regional Car Dealership Rococo (it's perfect!), but it still left me obscurely uncomfortable.
Tempting and enjoyable as it can be to mock Trump, and his absurd and transparent pretensions, I couldn't shake the feeling that sneering at someone's ignorance, particularly in the matter of taste, immediately marks one out as a member of the kind of "elites" that have understandably caused such vitriolic resentment. A sense of superiority, no matter how easily explained, always makes me question how justifiable such feelings are/can be.
I'm not preaching here - I've had to work out why I ended up feeling so uncomfortable after reading it and laughing, and this is just my first stab at trying to account for that feeling.
"
hsh: I agree. But I liked her take on it
He begins telling me about how America’s biggest problem is “decades of mass immigration”. I point out that the US is, you know, a nation of immigrants, to which he responds: “It was originally founded by people of north-west European ancestry.” I note there were people there before them. “There were native Americans, and they lost out,” he replies. “Sucks for them.” This is an odd comment from the spokesperson of a party claiming one of its key beliefs to be that “indigenous people have an inseparable bond with their homeland and are its natural stewards” to make.
and particularly when she says this:
Cave turns to me. “So what’s your skill then, spinning stuff into a story?”
“No,” I reply. “My skill is keeping a straight face when someone tells me something, and inside I’m thinking: fucking hell.”
"
A bunch of people I read were talking very enthusiastically about this piece by a FT journalist who went to a party for Curtis Yarvin and the "new, new right". It's reasonably insightful, and rather entertaining:
https://archive.ph/qgC6d
On “An open thread”
Hmmm, I will take that under advisement in case new pillow number 2 fails. I didn't know about little back-sleeping ones, I assumed normal pillow size. Is your pillow the same size as a regular pillow?
"
What sort of pillow?
Michael, your story of the buckwheat hull pillow doesn't surprise me. As far as I can work it out, for back sleeping the desired position is to have one's neck fully supported but not raised, and one's head somewhat lower to the point where that is achieved. Those kinds of pillows can achieve that, if you wiggle your head into it just right, as indeed did very over-stuffed goosedown pillows for me for a long time. But I think (after 30 years or so) I am long past that. Now it has to be pillows filled with different kinds and resistances of foam and memory foam, contoured in various ways that are just right for one's particular needs. And it's often, as it has been for me now, a system of trial and error, where you have to try with a particular new pillow for several days to be sure whether or not it's any good.
Unfortunately, I am now a side sleeper, and I have never worked out exactly what the ideal combination is for that. New pillow number 1 professed to be for both back and side sleepers, and was weirdly and alarmingly contoured, but it only seems to be (reasonably) good for back sleeping. The jury is still out on new pillow number 2, but it means I am currently juggling 4 different pillows!
"
My new pillow arrived today. My fingers are majorly crossed. And for russell and Pro Bono too: may all our physical problems get better, since our political ones (Ubu, Gaza and Ukraine etc) show no immediate sign of doing so.
Someone needs to find a way to enforce consequences or else we are in a de facto tyranny.
Absolutely right.
"
I reflected that Trump is firmly aligned on the side of Envy, Rapine, and Ignorance, and is, for the moment at least, triumphing over Truth and Learning.
Exactly right. But congratulations to your daughter, Pro Bono.
It's an extraordinary and underappreciated achievement for them to keep going in those circumstances.
Agreed.
Charles, thanks for Creatine suggestion. Will look into it.
"
russell @01.08: definitely not too much info. It's one thing to understand something intellectually, and another to understand it viscerally.
Funnily enough, I have been grappling with a version of this for several weeks, not as a result of covid, but because of something that recurs every several years and is usually solved fast with a new and different orthopaedic pillow. The symptom is a lot of neck and shoulder pain, but the result is that I have been getting only pathetic amounts of sleep, usually only a few (3-4) hours in total a night, in several increments. I am continually exhausted, my brain is increasingly sluggish, and I'm now waiting in desperate hope for new pillow number 2. As I lie in bed, juggling three different orthopaedic pillows and trying a different position every few minutes (but never my preferred, natural sleeping position), I think about how a condition so apparently unserious can cause so much misery, and I think a lot about those people who have to live for years in constant pain from serious, intractable conditions, and how on earth they manage it. In my own judgement, I do not come out well from the comparison.
So I feel for you, russell, even more than I would normally. I didn't know that the new strains of covid could still have such effects. I only hope they end soon, and that afterwards your accustomed good health and fitness reasserts itself, and lasts for many more years.
"
Open thread, so I found this (about and with an extract from Max Bennett's A Brief History of Intelligence) on the origins of human language, its relation to AI and other aspects, interesting. Also, it sent me down a rabbit hole about Kanzi, whom I had completely forgotten:
https://www.ian-leslie.com/p/the-one-weird-trick-that-gave-humans?utm_source=substack&publication_id=54748&post_id=169644176&utm_medium=email&utm_content=share&utm_campaign=email-share&triggerShare=true&isFreemail=false&r=w2vx&triedRedirect=true
"
Also, ensures that in the future, reliable statistics and actual facts are harder, or impossible, to come by.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.