By Lida Prypchan
Saying foolish things correctly is one of the rarest fruits of modern teaching. Anonymous.
The graduate in philosophy went to the platform. He definitely kept his enormous mouth open for two hours. During that prolonged lapse of time, the speaker gave a lecture full of strange and badly-used words. These were well pronounced and were in truth synonyms of those that belonged in the sentence, with the right meanings. But the lecturer thought that since it sounded so good when spoken by him, little did it matter sacrificing the audience’s understanding of the matter.
He fed the drowsy belly of his ego, using the large number of words he knew.
Playing with words is a double-edged sword. It ceases to be a danger when we master an issue to perfection and we have clear ideas on the matter. A vain person with precise notions about an issue may initially show off and even hope to impress his public, but he will always end up putting forward his ideas with simple words that can be understood by all. If this is not the case, we may deduce that he is not very convinced of what he thinks, that he himself does not understand it well and that that is why he wishes to dazzle us: to cover up his failings.
The last straw was at the end of the lecture, when he said: “Dear friends, I want to close this presentation quoting a famous phrase of Victor Hugo: Ceux qui vivent, cesont ceux qui luttent.” Immediately some men and women applauded from their seats and others even approached the lecturer to congratulate him; “I thought: a fool always finds a greater fool to admire him and laugh at his jokes.”
Definition of fool or idiot: he who, being aware of things, chooses to look the other way. He is afraid of giving his opinion and being laughed at: he underestimates himself this much! He prefers to applaud and present himself as someone he is not, than to recognize that he does not understand or does not agree with what the speaker says. In simpler terms: he prefers to play the fool to not be rejected by the majority. Erasmus of Rotterdam, in his work “The Praise of Folly or Praise of Human Stupidity”, says the following: “I wish with this to imitate the rhetorics (experts in forced thinking) of our time, who believe themselves gods by simply showing that they have two tongues, like leeches, and who think they are doing wonders by including some Greek words in their Latin lectures.
They unearth from some old parchment words whose obscurity obfuscates those present, so that those who understand them are more and more pleased by it, and those who do not, admire them more the less they understand them. And if among them there are some who are more vain, they applaud and move their ears, and with that they will have more than enough to make the rest believe that they understand perfectly, although deep down they don’t understand a single word.”
The other day, I found a curious fact: there are eighty synonyms for the word idiot, while its opposite, sensible, has only ten. This demonstrates that the Royal Academy of Language felt obligated to give tools to sensible people in order to explain to idiots their sad condition.
We must consider what attitude to adopt when faced with idiots since they may make us waste time and even lose our good sense with their vanity and their eagerness to show that which they do not possess. Taking advantage of their powerful loquacity, they can hold posts they do not deserve and lead institutions to ruin.
People show who they are by what they say: they deny or affirm the presence or the absence of a certain personality trait. When something is denied insistently, it is present in the personality. That is why to identify them, always remember this thought: “Tell me what you think and I will tell you what you lack.”
Aware that I am becoming an idiot, I shall end here. See you soon!
