I am not sure how much of this is true. In India for example - people do get called "Kitabi Kida"(bookworm) and I forget but there is a insult for people who have gained knowledge from reading books but aren't street smart.
India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine. I don't need my doctor to relate to my economic difficulties to treat my illness but this may be a desirable trait in a politician.
The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The author may have a point about schools spending lot of money on stadiums and sports and ignoring investment in science and technology but there may be other reasons for that - other than unbridled hate for smart people.
I think there is clear distinction between being literate and being smart. Many politicians that you noted or otherwise, have used their smartness and political acumen, to achieve what they wanted. Their smartness mostly reflects in the form of misleading voices, captivating their electorate's emotions. Dishonest, but smart. I think an achievement in STEM is not the only proof of smartness.
As far as Kitabi Kida goes - to my understanding, it is used for those who spent inordinate amount of time with books - not necessarily a insult for being smart. I think there's a subtle distinction here too.
>>In India for example - people do get called "Kitabi Kida"(bookworm)
We also have a saying: पढोगे लिखोगे बनोगे नवाब, खेलोगे कूदोगे बनोगे ख़राब
Which literally translates to education makes you a king, and playing makes you spoilt.
The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.
>>I forget but there is a insult for people who have gained knowledge from reading books but aren't street smart.
Mostly in our culture we try to accumulate a lot at little effort, so cheating is a valuable skill.
>>India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
For the most of India's political history leaders were about representing people and segments of society backward compared to already well of folks. So what matters really is what policy outlook you have.
But you still have Jawaharlal Nehru who was the prime minister for 17 years, Manmohan Singh was for 10 years. Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi were both well read and groomed individuals. And you could say Indira was a far better Prime minister than we've had since Nehru.
You have like a good 40 years of well read people running the country.
>>I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine.
No, its the same. If a person is a deep bigot, violence monger from within, he choses leaders who are best at that. Its just that intention doesn't show on people's faces. And whatever they may say outside, they vote with their hearts at the voting booth.
>>The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The Doctor analogy describes this better. You chose a good doctor to treat your heart. You don't go to a bad one whole smiles and cracks jokes.
> The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.
No, it's a literal translation of "book worm". I've never seen it used for people who just have quirky interests and don't otherwise read or study a lot.
> India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister.
Yet he promotes technology (Startup India, Paperless/Digital Locker, Digital ID, Live tracking of projects online, EVMs, Soil testing labs, Solar) much more than one of the IIT educated Chief Minister. The point is that a good leader does not need fancy degrees from fancy colleges.
The IIT guy is only saying if you don't fix education and healthcare, you won't have people who can do basic knowledge work, let alone write operating systems and do other big research work.
That was the whole idea behind Nehruvian socialism. The problem in essence is in a country with poverty levels comparable to Africa, absent education systems, near zero literacy levels. How do you run a capitalist economy? The best you can manage with that kind of human resources is give them dumbest possible manufacturing jobs, by letting foreign investors control what is a newly independent country. Hence around 1947, the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru, came up education institutions the likes of IITs, IIScs and other regional colleges. Once you have these people first rung of talented human resources ready, you can now use them to build your private industries. But you can't wait till then, so you still have to build your bureaucracy with pretty darn high civil services exam standards. This is important because while you are building your people, you need to build some government owned industries. This will eventually feed momentum to later to come private industries.
The net result is you get public sector industries, you get ISRO, you get DRDO, you get a stable bureaucracy. All of this will essentially run your country.
The next set of work to do is to fix primary education. So that even the bottom most layers of the society can get a shot at doing good things in life.
You also need healthcare. Because if 20% of your population is limping with polio or can't breath properly because of TB then you can't be a decent economy anyway.
For all that is told about things like Bay Area. The edge California has is not US-101-N or the Caltrain, Its the people.
The IIT guy is the first guy in decades who is taking sense, instead of trying to sell building websites(which any idiot can build) as progress.
Ahh... that explains the poor quality of the writing in the article.
Ted Rall is perhaps the least interesting, least insightful, and least amusing living political cartoonist. He fills a certain political niche though, which I guess pays the bills.
Not much of it is true. It's a very old derogatory attack, that goes back to the foundations of the US and the earlier colonies. The 'cultured' Western European elites mocked the region back then as uncivilized, filled with barbarians and simpletons, and so on. This was of course a time when people like Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Paine and Benjamin Franklin were actually arguing and then implementing enlightenment policies in political fact, while nearly all of Europe would proceed to be ruled by despots for another 100-200 years. To say nothing of the flight of people from Europe to American shores over the coming century plus, desperate to escape extreme poverty in Western Europe. And yet the snobbish attacks continued just the same.
Take for example the song, Yankee Doodle, one of the more amusing cases of this in action -
"Traditions place its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War" ... "The British troops sang it to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap."
"It was also popular among the Americans as a song of defiance."
But these words are targeted at people who are not actually smart, but work hard to cover it up. In the west though, people who are actually smart get the hate. In fact, if you are in the top 0.5% or so, you could consider yourself lucky when you end up JUST ostracized. (Elon Musk famously got bullied so severely he had to get his nose fixed so he could breathe well)
There is this mysterious condition first described by Hans Asperger around the WWII, that the chinese fail to recognize and western scientists gave up understanding, until it was finally reclassified as a form of autism, as by every cognitive test they could think of, the people score normal, or (often highly) above average, yet they completely fail at interacting with other people. That is, until somebody realized they are too smart and nobody wants to interact with them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/
This is a necessary consequence of individualism, as being smart in an individualist culture means you are a dangerous competition to basically everybody else, and everybody will do everything they can to make you fail. So it's pretty much certain that an individualist culture will eventually result in "idiocracy" by breeding itself stupid.
Being well-eduxated doesn't make for a good leader; Rahul Gandhi has a better educational pedigree than Narendra Modi, but in no world is he a better leader.
There are insults for smart people in many countries.
In Britain, for example, there's a whole attitude about anybody daring to appear smart, well read, etc that's combined with class putdowns and terms like "pretentious wanker" and such.
Or, what americans would deride as a "nerd" for Brits it would be a "swot" (but it's meaning I think combines nerd with teacher's pet and bookworm).
French have "intello", a derogatory term for intellectual types. Greeks have a similar connotation "kulturiaris" (and a term for nerd/geek that's "spasiklas").
In Spanish, where the author says he couldn't find a term for "geek", they have "empollon".
intello m, f (plural intellos)
(informal, derogatory) highbrow
(informal, derogatory) nerd, egghead
Also, "intello coincée" and such.
It can also stand for just shorthand, as many terms have dual informal derogatory and friendly use (for that matter, geek has also been used positively in the US as well for a few decades).
I think almost every culture has a term for people who are on the asperger spectrum and have high IQ but low EQ. In Chinese, "理工男" translates to roughly "Science Guy" and refers to people who are like Sheldon on the Big Bang Theory. "书呆子" means bookworm and refers to people with a lot of book smarts but not much street smarts.
I turned to Google Translate in search of a French translation for the English word “geek.” There wasn’t one.
Maybe ask a French person then. “Intello” (dismissive diminutive of the word “intellectuel”) is in very common usage amongst school kids, and has been since at least the 60s. “Premier de la classe” (first of the class) is also used very pejoratively by children. Recently though, the French have been very happy to use the word “geek” (albeit pronounced with a French accent) in its original English meaning.
On the other hand, languages like French are extremely rich in insults for stupid people: “bete comme ses pieds,” or “dumb as hell,” literally means “as stupid as his/her feet.”
American English is full of expressions just as colorful than the French in that regard, eg “not the brightest crayon in the box”, “not the sharpest tool in the shed”, “dumber than a bag of hammers”, etc.
This blog post is just a succession of these easily falsiable generalizations that try to use pseudo-linguistic reasoning to demonstrate a blanket sweeping subjective statement (“Americans hate smart people”).
Indeed I found the premise about romantic languages quite ridiculous as I could readily think of a few pejoratives in French from the top of my head, and pretty sure I forget or miss some of them, so when TFA reaches to French I was flabbergasted.
"Intello", "être une tête" (can be used both positively and negatively), "grosse tête", "quatre-yeux" (typical image of nerds with thick glasses), "tête d'ampoule" (probably the closest to nerd together with "intello"), "avoir une tête de premier de la classe", "binoclard", "coincé", "pingouin", "rat de bibliothèque", "taupe"...
> This blog post is just a succession of these easily falsiable generalizations that try to use pseudo-linguistic reasoning to demonstrate a blanket sweeping subjective statement (“Americans hate smart people”).
Much like psychologists, linguists suffer a constant barrage of comments and articles by people who think they understand the field but don't. It's quite easy to not know the sheer scope of our ignorance in these fields, unlike STEM where people at least tend to realize they know close to nothing.
And doing it badly -- all the countries he mentions have derogatory terms analogous to nerd, but he couldn't get to them in Google Translate by searching for "geek", so he came to the conclusion that they don't have anti-intellectual words at all.
No, that's only half of it. The other half is to smugly remind us how much smarter Democrats are than Republicans.
Clinton > Trump
Gore > Bush
Stevenson > Eisenhower
Remarkable how, in this writer's mind, an intellectual noted for "promotion of progressive causes in the Democratic Party" is obviously superior to a five-star general who played a very key part in the Allies defeating Hitler in WWII.
Anti-intellectualism is pretty strong in the UK too. For example in one of the defining moments of the Brexit campaign, Michael Gove was confronted by an open letter from a large number of leading economists saying how damaging Brexit would be to the economy and said “people in this country have had enough of experts”.
While I have no love of Gove, this is a very unfair and context-free quote. The full quote is as follows:
> I think that the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying - from organisations with acronyms - saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong, because these people - these people - are the same ones who got consistently wrong.
Wow. I've seen the quote often, but never with that surrounding context. Completely makes you understand why politicians would be unwilling to talk with the press.
I think the connection is stronger than that. The jocks-rule culture of American high school is purloined from elite British schools, which were designed to crank out colonial functionaries with intense in-group loyalties. Alex Renton's book Stiff Upper Lip is good on this.
In fact, while it is perhaps unsurprising that Rall has missed examples in Chinese and Indian languages listed elsewhere here, it's odd that he misses the many examples in British English - swot, spod, boffin ... Several of which originate in 'good' schools.
Maybe because '72% of economists in a Bloomberg poll immediately after the EU referendum vote predicted that there would be a recession in 2016 or 2017. In a Royal Economic Society survey of economists, 90% said there would be a short-term loss associated with Brexit.'. Similarly top economists predicted a recession in the US after the election. Neither occurred.
Truth be told, the brexit hasn't happened yet, thus the causes of those recessions are not in place.
IIRC even Corbin acknowledges that brexit will have a deep impact on the UK's economy.
I think the author entirely misses the primary issue due to linguistic and/or cultural context omissions.
Generally speaking, when someone is called a nerd or (insert uncool descriptive modifier), it's not implied that being smart or studious is something people should be embarrassed of.
Instead, it's implying the lack of some other social skill, trait or normative behavior (i.e., not participating in sports as a child or general difficulty fitting in).
For example, being a genius or reliable hard worker is almost universally admired. Yes, even in the United States. However, if an individual is brilliant yet lacks the social skills to fit in, appears to try too hard relative to the group or makes others feel uncomfortable, their behavior may be seen as idiosyncratic or weird.
Individuals that can display their cognitive abilities while inspiring, impressing or leading others are usually admired.
I've noted that the journalists at The Register are unable to write an article about scientists discovering, inventing something without using the word "boffin". See for example:
Readit News
India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine. I don't need my doctor to relate to my economic difficulties to treat my illness but this may be a desirable trait in a politician.
The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The author may have a point about schools spending lot of money on stadiums and sports and ignoring investment in science and technology but there may be other reasons for that - other than unbridled hate for smart people.
As far as Kitabi Kida goes - to my understanding, it is used for those who spent inordinate amount of time with books - not necessarily a insult for being smart. I think there's a subtle distinction here too.
We also have a saying: पढोगे लिखोगे बनोगे नवाब, खेलोगे कूदोगे बनोगे ख़राब
Which literally translates to education makes you a king, and playing makes you spoilt.
The generic किताबी कीड़ा insult is largely for nerds with awkward interests and lifestyles.
>>I forget but there is a insult for people who have gained knowledge from reading books but aren't street smart.
Mostly in our culture we try to accumulate a lot at little effort, so cheating is a valuable skill.
>>India elected Narendra Modi who is decidedly nowhere as educated as previous prime minister. The state I am from(Bihar) had series of Chief Ministers who weren't all the educated(or even intelligent as a matter of fact).
For the most of India's political history leaders were about representing people and segments of society backward compared to already well of folks. So what matters really is what policy outlook you have.
But you still have Jawaharlal Nehru who was the prime minister for 17 years, Manmohan Singh was for 10 years. Rajiv Gandhi and Indira Gandhi were both well read and groomed individuals. And you could say Indira was a far better Prime minister than we've had since Nehru.
You have like a good 40 years of well read people running the country.
>>I think people select their politicians differently than how they would select their Doctor or mechanic to repair their car or engine.
No, its the same. If a person is a deep bigot, violence monger from within, he choses leaders who are best at that. Its just that intention doesn't show on people's faces. And whatever they may say outside, they vote with their hearts at the voting booth.
>>The point is - smart people are not always likable and in a politician likability and ability to relate yourself to him/her(even if faked) are desired qualities.
The Doctor analogy describes this better. You chose a good doctor to treat your heart. You don't go to a bad one whole smiles and cracks jokes.
No, it's a literal translation of "book worm". I've never seen it used for people who just have quirky interests and don't otherwise read or study a lot.
Yet he promotes technology (Startup India, Paperless/Digital Locker, Digital ID, Live tracking of projects online, EVMs, Soil testing labs, Solar) much more than one of the IIT educated Chief Minister. The point is that a good leader does not need fancy degrees from fancy colleges.
That was the whole idea behind Nehruvian socialism. The problem in essence is in a country with poverty levels comparable to Africa, absent education systems, near zero literacy levels. How do you run a capitalist economy? The best you can manage with that kind of human resources is give them dumbest possible manufacturing jobs, by letting foreign investors control what is a newly independent country. Hence around 1947, the then PM Jawaharlal Nehru, came up education institutions the likes of IITs, IIScs and other regional colleges. Once you have these people first rung of talented human resources ready, you can now use them to build your private industries. But you can't wait till then, so you still have to build your bureaucracy with pretty darn high civil services exam standards. This is important because while you are building your people, you need to build some government owned industries. This will eventually feed momentum to later to come private industries.
The net result is you get public sector industries, you get ISRO, you get DRDO, you get a stable bureaucracy. All of this will essentially run your country.
The next set of work to do is to fix primary education. So that even the bottom most layers of the society can get a shot at doing good things in life.
You also need healthcare. Because if 20% of your population is limping with polio or can't breath properly because of TB then you can't be a decent economy anyway.
For all that is told about things like Bay Area. The edge California has is not US-101-N or the Caltrain, Its the people.
The IIT guy is the first guy in decades who is taking sense, instead of trying to sell building websites(which any idiot can build) as progress.
Fix your people, then your people fix everything.
Ted Rall, ladies and gentlemen.
Ted Rall is perhaps the least interesting, least insightful, and least amusing living political cartoonist. He fills a certain political niche though, which I guess pays the bills.
Not much of it is true. It's a very old derogatory attack, that goes back to the foundations of the US and the earlier colonies. The 'cultured' Western European elites mocked the region back then as uncivilized, filled with barbarians and simpletons, and so on. This was of course a time when people like Adams, Madison, Jefferson, Paine and Benjamin Franklin were actually arguing and then implementing enlightenment policies in political fact, while nearly all of Europe would proceed to be ruled by despots for another 100-200 years. To say nothing of the flight of people from Europe to American shores over the coming century plus, desperate to escape extreme poverty in Western Europe. And yet the snobbish attacks continued just the same.
Take for example the song, Yankee Doodle, one of the more amusing cases of this in action -
"Traditions place its origin in a pre-Revolutionary War song originally sung by British military officers to mock the disheveled, disorganized colonial "Yankees" with whom they served in the French and Indian War" ... "The British troops sang it to make fun of their stereotype of the American soldier as a Yankee simpleton who thought that he was stylish if he simply stuck a feather in his cap."
"It was also popular among the Americans as a song of defiance."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yankee_Doodle
There is this mysterious condition first described by Hans Asperger around the WWII, that the chinese fail to recognize and western scientists gave up understanding, until it was finally reclassified as a form of autism, as by every cognitive test they could think of, the people score normal, or (often highly) above average, yet they completely fail at interacting with other people. That is, until somebody realized they are too smart and nobody wants to interact with them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4927579/
This is a necessary consequence of individualism, as being smart in an individualist culture means you are a dangerous competition to basically everybody else, and everybody will do everything they can to make you fail. So it's pretty much certain that an individualist culture will eventually result in "idiocracy" by breeding itself stupid.
That's "insults for hard work" perhaps, but not "insults for smart people".
In Britain, for example, there's a whole attitude about anybody daring to appear smart, well read, etc that's combined with class putdowns and terms like "pretentious wanker" and such.
Or, what americans would deride as a "nerd" for Brits it would be a "swot" (but it's meaning I think combines nerd with teacher's pet and bookworm).
French have "intello", a derogatory term for intellectual types. Greeks have a similar connotation "kulturiaris" (and a term for nerd/geek that's "spasiklas").
In Spanish, where the author says he couldn't find a term for "geek", they have "empollon".
In Italian the same would be secchione.
"Intello" is not derogatory, it's just short for intellectual.
intello m, f (plural intellos) (informal, derogatory) highbrow (informal, derogatory) nerd, egghead
Also, "intello coincée" and such.
It can also stand for just shorthand, as many terms have dual informal derogatory and friendly use (for that matter, geek has also been used positively in the US as well for a few decades).
Maybe ask a French person then. “Intello” (dismissive diminutive of the word “intellectuel”) is in very common usage amongst school kids, and has been since at least the 60s. “Premier de la classe” (first of the class) is also used very pejoratively by children. Recently though, the French have been very happy to use the word “geek” (albeit pronounced with a French accent) in its original English meaning.
On the other hand, languages like French are extremely rich in insults for stupid people: “bete comme ses pieds,” or “dumb as hell,” literally means “as stupid as his/her feet.”
American English is full of expressions just as colorful than the French in that regard, eg “not the brightest crayon in the box”, “not the sharpest tool in the shed”, “dumber than a bag of hammers”, etc.
This blog post is just a succession of these easily falsiable generalizations that try to use pseudo-linguistic reasoning to demonstrate a blanket sweeping subjective statement (“Americans hate smart people”).
"Intello", "être une tête" (can be used both positively and negatively), "grosse tête", "quatre-yeux" (typical image of nerds with thick glasses), "tête d'ampoule" (probably the closest to nerd together with "intello"), "avoir une tête de premier de la classe", "binoclard", "coincé", "pingouin", "rat de bibliothèque", "taupe"...
Much like psychologists, linguists suffer a constant barrage of comments and articles by people who think they understand the field but don't. It's quite easy to not know the sheer scope of our ignorance in these fields, unlike STEM where people at least tend to realize they know close to nothing.
> I think that the people of this country have had enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying - from organisations with acronyms - saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong, because these people - these people - are the same ones who got consistently wrong.
In fact, while it is perhaps unsurprising that Rall has missed examples in Chinese and Indian languages listed elsewhere here, it's odd that he misses the many examples in British English - swot, spod, boffin ... Several of which originate in 'good' schools.
Well, in an era when experts give their "expert" opinion based on who pays their bills, that's true for most of the world...
Generally speaking, when someone is called a nerd or (insert uncool descriptive modifier), it's not implied that being smart or studious is something people should be embarrassed of.
Instead, it's implying the lack of some other social skill, trait or normative behavior (i.e., not participating in sports as a child or general difficulty fitting in).
For example, being a genius or reliable hard worker is almost universally admired. Yes, even in the United States. However, if an individual is brilliant yet lacks the social skills to fit in, appears to try too hard relative to the group or makes others feel uncomfortable, their behavior may be seen as idiosyncratic or weird.
Individuals that can display their cognitive abilities while inspiring, impressing or leading others are usually admired.
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/28/hacking_motion_cont...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/07/27/screaming_channels_...
https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/08/01/ncsc_ubuntu/
Dead Comment