No, this isn’t about the “soft bigotry of low expectations,” I just did that to catch the eye. There is no heat in my office, my hands are cold, and the only way to keep myself typing is to start with something eye-grabbing. This is actually about the state of Maine (with which I have family connections) and the results of their referendum on same-sex marriage.
1) Why a referendum at all? Since when do we put constitutional rights to a popular vote? The fact that we have done it, in California and Maine, begs the question. Holding a referendum (regardless of its outcome) presumes that we don’t consider marriage a constitutional right, despite the Supreme Court’s ruling in the marvelously-named Loving vs. Virginia case 40 years ago. Foo.
2) Does that mean that those who voted to repeal same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted?
3) Or does it mean that the supporters of same-sex marriage in those states were bigoted when they called their opponents bigots? Or that they were interfering with their opponents’ First Amendment rights by advocating boycotts and other non-violent demonstrations of opposition to the repealers? Conservatives seem to consider being labeled as bigots to be a fate worse than, say, Matthew Shepard’s death. Whatever happened to “sticks and stones”?
The word “bigot,” BTW, is believed to come from some Germanic sort of root meaning “by God.” There is a literal equivalent in Spanish, referring to little old ladies in black crepe who spend most of their time in churches: pordiosera. For more etymological information, see the Wikipedia entry.
Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.” Mr. Wired draws a very useful distinction between them. “Prejudice” is what everybody has a bunch of, just by virtue of having been born and raised in a particular context. Most of them we don’t even notice most of the time. They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in. But as a practical matter they’re morally neutral. It is useful to be aware of one’s own prejudices, because that enables us to avoid discrimination.
Discrimination is not morally neutral. It involves acting on one’s prejudices, to the detriment of the well-being of others. It’s a real sin. Not serving people in restaurants. Not letting them hold certain jobs. Beating them up. Hate crimes.
Very often, the way we become aware of our prejudices is by somehow associating their object with our children. Desegregating schools unveiled a lot of parental bigotry after the promulgation of Brown vs. Board of Education. White people who were willing to work with, or even for, African-Americans, or to vote for them, or to recognize the legal authority of people who had been elected mainly by the Black vote, found themselves drawing the line at the schoolhouse door.
The campaign against same-sex marriage in Maine apparently owes its success to the claim that schoolchildren would have to be taught that same-sex marriage was no different from the usual kind. So far as anybody can tell, that claim was utter hogwash, but, as other bloggers have already pointed out, it served as a proxy for the Bigotry That Dares Not Speak Its Name, opposition to allowing our children to be aware of otherwise normal people being gay. How we want to raise our children (as opposed to how we live our own lives) is often an expression of both our highest values and our lowest prejudices.
Many otherwise very decent opponents of same-sex marriage are perfectly okay with civil unions. As a practical matter, that keeps them mostly on the right side of the prejudice-discrimination line. Most same-sex couples will not suffer unduly from having civil unions rather than marriages, given proper legal drafting. Until we think about why these decent anti-same-sex-marriage opponents want to take that position. It’s really the same reason that classical and medieval authorities required prostitutes, and Jews, to wear distinctive dress. Not because Those People were so utterly different from The Rest of Us, but precisely because they weren’t. Without the yellow hat or the blond wig or the six-pointed star, they could easily be mistaken for, and treated like, Real People. We wouldn’t know whom to discriminate against.
When one of my colleagues tells me he frequents gay bars because he is “husband-hunting” (and I respond, as gently as possible, by telling him that bars are not usually great places to meet spouses), the very normality of this exchange puts any eavesdropping adolescent at the risk of concluding that gay people are just like the rest of us. For that matter, what happens when your kid’s high school class does a field trip to the local court and hears the judge, in the course of jury selection, ask a member of the panel, “Are you married or do you have a domestic partner?” (Yes, here in Cook County, they do that.) We can’t have that, can we?
Many sincere and religious people believe that homosexual behavior is a sin. Most of them also believe that adultery is a sin (one which is usually condemned in the same biblical paragraphs as homosexuality, and sentenced to the same punishment, by the way.) Many of them even believe that remarriage after divorce is a sin. But they somehow survive their children interacting with, or at least becoming very aware of, the public adulterers and remarried divorcés around them. So apparently their religiously-based discomfort with those classes of sinners does not get translated into discrimination, maybe not even into prejudice. One has to conclude that homosexuality is different for reasons that have nothing to do with biblical morality. The yuck factor, as some religious bloggers have termed it.
So, okay, I’m willing not to call same-sex-marriage opponents bigots if they’re willing to allow civil unions (or, for that matter, religious marriages) with all of the privileges that go with civil marriage in this society—so long as they don’t treat people in civil unions, and gay people in general, any differently than they treat public adulterers and remarried divorcés. Which means allowing their kids to interact with and be aware of and be taught in school by all, or none, of these public sinners.
CynThesis
Now that we’ve explicated the word as well as one can these days, let’s scrap it. It’s not useful for this discussion. Let’s, instead, use “prejudice” and “discrimination.”
That’s my feeling. “Bigot” only works as a useful word for people who’ve pushed their hatefulness beyond what’s currently accepted (e.g. Phelps church – well, actually I’d like to set the bar considerably higher than that, but it’s easier to use the word the more Phelps-like the object of it is); “prejudice” and “discrimination” are more useful for critiquing commonly held beliefs and actions. They’ll still, of course, get people’s backs up who think their prejudices are right, and their discrimination legitimate, but they’re better for getting at the ways in which we all may be biased, and our responsibility to monitor those biases so that they don’t lead us to actually act in discriminatory ways.
They’re as close to original sin as I can allow myself to believe in.
Ditto. It’s pretty much the example I use to make the whole original sin doctrine make any sense to me at all.
“bigot” has an explosive feeling in the mouth, making it an excellent word, in a tactile sense, to use when angry. Other than that, i see no advantage to using it.
thanks for this thoughtful commentary. It puts many thoughts together that I hadn’t been able to. I especially appreciative of the second to last paragraph.
At the risk of commenting, my good CynThesis, you seem to have seized a perfectly useful neutral term, discrimination, and sold it down the river into the land of tainted Newspeak.
Lest by my own active discriminating between this category and that category, including political categories, and in so doing now risking becoming guilty of the wholesale crime of discrimination, I might be wiser to leave the doing or not doing of any discrimination at all to others to do for me, if in fact any discrimination is to be done at all.
Perhaps, though, we might all agree for the sake of comity that no discrimination needs be done at all, and so popularly promulgated political terms could then be peacefully and uncritically accepted to mean and to apply to whatever their sponsors desire such that no one need risk any disapprobation by offering otherwise.
But, look now, to my chagrin I have already indicted myself as guilty of discrimination in the very sentences just written.
On the other hand, you have taken the popularly understood nominal term used to describe one ready and willing to act on his prejudices to the extent of his individual will and ability and chosen to jettison it arbitrarily for reasons unclear (a bigot is nothing more than an actively prejudiced person; although we could, we do not currently call such a person “a prejudice”). In so doing, for one thing, you allow the particular term “racist” to now unilaterally and opportunistically promote itself to the universal place formerly held by “bigot”, with whatever unintended consequences might attend to that, also arbitrary, substitution.
Perhaps you would be so kind as to deal further with these obvious difficulties.
I sort of understand the argument that some people oppose gay marriage because they oppose any change in society. Change entails risk. I do not find it compelling enough to go along with it. I think a lot of the anti gay marriage people are upset by the yuck factor. I think most oppose it just because it has always been opposed and never take the time to think it through.
Steve
My general complaint is one shared by observant people in the midst of lexicon shifts, immortalized by Inigo Montoya: “Why do you keep using that word? I do not think it means what you think it means.” ;-D
Today’s semantic inversion is tomorrow’s (next century’s) standard usage. One can see that throughout history. The question I prefer to the one our host offers is this: How does your (proposed, modified, rebellious, pick a term) usage promote the topic or facilitate discussing it?
As with a few other things about which I am passionate, bigotry is a term I use based on something my mother taught me.
She avowed a deep and unchangeable view that the German culture is rotten at its core. That she was a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust explains her feelings, but not her adamance. I once confronted her about this, we engaged in an increasingly heated argument, and it culminated (and ended) with me nearly shouting at her that she was a bigot about Germans.
We both got quiet, I out of shock at my own outburst and the disrespect it showed, she out of a sudden realization: she was, in fact, a bigot, and admitted the truth of it to me right in that moment.
Anyway, the lesson I learned was that understanding the other is critically important, worthy of the effort it requires, but that no one can validly assume or accuse understanding being the same as agreement. In our culture, as it is now and has been for some decades, the equating of understanding and agreement is the fallacy that kills open and honest communication. I would have much less objection to lexicon shifts if they served understanding better.
@H. M. Stuart: Well, there’s a difference between connotation and denotation, and, arguably, the several relevant words can be interpreted in different directions.
Discrimination: In principle, a neutral word that could be applied either to acceptable ways of making distinctions (a meaning preserved when one says someone is discriminating), but seems to have a connotation of generally being applied more to the negative varieties, to the point where any time I hear people using it another way, I usually hear them making an explanation for why that usage is appropriate.
Prejudice: Pretty much as Cynthesis uses it, the biases we have before we act on them, and thus, one of the morally milder words one can apply.
Racism: Either, 1) Really, really, especially bad prejudice based on race, should not be applied to ordinary, nice people who are just a little biased (and therefore never something you or your friends are guilty of), or, 2) Any prejudice or discrimination at all that’s based on race, whether mild or severe, or 3) Only systemic racism, where prejudice is tied to power (so prejudice directed by the weak against the powerful, even if it’s based on race, is not racism, just prejudice). All of these three contradictory definitions seem to be in common use. And sometimes, 4) Only “reverse racism,” but somehow never racism that favors white people, but this definition, of all the available ones, seems least defensible.
Bigotry: Can be 1) Prejudice + action (in which case any unjust prejudice, acted on, is bigotry, even if it’s widely shared and not yet understood to be unjust), but can also have the connotation of 2) Really, really bad kinds of prejudiced actions, ones that are particularly hateful and way outside the norm.
One way around this, if you prefer to keep the neutral meaning for “discrimination” is to speak of “acting in a bigoted way” rather than calling someone a “bigot,” so that you’re not suggesting something deeply wrong with the person as a whole because he or she hasn’t risen above his or her social context, in terms of not acting on prejudice. Or just say “acting based on prejudice.” I do think “bigot” is too strong a word for someone who voted against same-sex marriage, might have voted yes on civil unions, and doesn’t go out of his or her way to give gay and lesbian people trouble, or, at any rate, not a rhetorically useful word; on the other hand, I don’t particularly have a problem with applying the word to activists and pundits who are actively drumming up hostility to gay and lesbian rights.
Mainly, though, if someone objects to being called a “bigot,” it seems better to rephrase with different words (“yuck factor,” “prejudice,” whatever), to see whether they’re objecting to any suggestion at all that they’re irrationally prejudice (in which case, it’s hard to engage the argument, since any argument that same-sex marriage should be approved is inherently an argument that objections to it are irrational prejudice), or whether they’re open for discussion if you get rid of the particular word at issue. Sometimes, people just can’t stand having a particular word applied to themselves, but will listen if different words are used, while other times, any phrasing at all will get the “I’m not a racist” or “I’m not a bigot” objection, so that it’s not possible to have any useful conversation about the possibility of biases any milder than pointy white hats and flaming crosses.
To those who have been to school and own a dictionary, discrimination is as indispenasable to a properly human, and humane, life as breathing. Let us have more of it, please. Much more.
Racist is no more a synonym for bigot than African-American is a synonym for black in the racial/ethnic sense, and to imply otherwise is to be needlessly niggardly with linguistic truth.
I have never, nor will I ever, refer to a black person as an African-American, for I try to avoid needlessly insulting people.
Nor will I ever refer to an American Indian as a Native American – and for the same reasons of truth-telling and avoidance of insult to the truth.
@DSL: Sure, racist is a subset of bigot, not a synonym.
Native American, as far as I can tell, is a usage that’s fading (I’ve been told that the preferred usage now is the person’s actual tribe, if you know it, and that otherwise American Indian’s just as acceptable as Native American). But I’m willing to stand corrected if anyone’s more up on the matter than I am.
When I used the words “racist” and “bigot” together, I only meant that both are words that often get defensive reactions, and that some may want to apply to prejudiced actions in general while others may want to reserve them for really, really bad ones. So, similar rhetorical problem, not actual synonyms.
I don’t mind being discriminating at all–as a Master of Meticulosity such behavior is second nature to me. I do worry, because I have learned that I am prejudiced due to my upbringing and environment, that I may be a “bigot”, or “racist”, or “anti-small-minded judgementalist” because I know that I am prejudiced against them.
I think Lynn is on to something to say “let’s say ‘acting in a bigoted way’ rather than ‘bigot’”. What the bad stuff is about is about behavior. There are many psychologically-based reasons why we might think, or feel, or be motivated by, things of which I rationally disapprove. But if it doesn’t change my behavior (what I say, do, or support), then maybe that’s the best I can do.
It’s also pointless to say “*you* are a *****”. When what I usually mean is “I dislike your behavior, and I am ascribing to you base motives to which you fully subscribe in your heart”. It’s really about me, not about you.
So “you are acting in a proctomorphic way” is preferable to “you are a proctomorph”? Okay, I guess that works.
Well, his (aka “the person’s) mother probably doesn’t think he’s a proctomorph, so the first formulation is more universal. Technically, though, all you can really say is “You are acting in a way that seems proctomorphic to me”, which has less bite although more accuracy. sigh.
At the risk of commenting again, the comment stream above would seem to richly unpack and illustrate the basic principles with which political war is waged in language, as Orwell long ago observed: to ultimately reduce one’s opponent, by voluntary, self-induced doubt, guilt, and shame over every possible choice with which he might venture to even think about the world, to a fugue state of aphasiac paralysis, while reserving for oneself as right and necessary every possible actionable option, no matter how conceptually, linguistically, or morally/ethically self-contradictory it might turn out to be. This understanding, of course, long predates Orwell, who merely popularized it in the Twentieth Century.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
It seems to me that you are giving the arguments in this stream a broader scope than I see they warrant–rather than turning any fellow discourser to a fugue state of aphasic paralysis, the threaders merely want to observe that using language as an instrument of total war regardless of the meaning of that language is contrary to the principles of intellectual discourse. I expect political and cultural war-wagers to continue to feel free to hurl verbal bolts of shame, doubt, and guilt. I’m just saying that I’ve observed that treating such bolts as if they had meaningful content hasn’t gotten me anywhere.
My good Metanous,
Perhaps, using the conjunction of elements in your first sentence, you are attributing to me actions I have not yet undertaken. Your first clause, that I was placing the arguments in this thread in their broadest conceptual context/what they ultimately ended up describing, is true; your second, that I was describing or accusing any one discourser of “turning any fellow discourser to a fugue state of aphasic paralysis” is a suggestion wholly of your own concoction and does not become true merely by your having spot-welded it to your first clause.
The reason I said that the thread richly unpacked and illustrated the principles I then described was that the thread conflates two elements, the first element attempting to deal with an objectively accurate or inaccurate meaning of language (the thread began as an ad hoc suggestion to redefine certain language usage), the second element attempting to evaluate the subjective (diplomatic, psychological) impact of that language on any recipient/object of its usage: is it more diplomatic, does it hurt the recipient asshole’s feelings less to declare “So ‘you are acting in a proctomorphic way” is preferable to “you are a proctomorph’? Okay, I guess that works.”
After subjecting our objective decisions on language usage to a hypothetical conclusion of what a recipient’s mother might or might not think (on the other hand, she might equally agree with everyone that he is, indeed, fully a proctomorph), your own conclusion was that the best we can hope for is a universal, nihilistic subjectivism: “Technically, though, all you can really say is “You are acting in a way that seems proctomorphic to me”, which has less bite although more accuracy. sigh.”
Again, convincing a side to voluntarily deliquesce into such a sighing state of impotent, nihilistic subjectivism was precisely one of the dynamics I was articulating, and, again, the logical extension of that urge is that, to be the most safely accurate ultimately, or to hurt the recipient’s feelings the least, perhaps it is best to say nothing at all.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Dearest H.M.: I happily stand corrected should anyone erroneously infer that you were describing or accusing any one discourser of etc. etc. As is so often the case, I cannot be clear on your motives until you describe them.
However, you seem to mistake me for someone who is concerned with the possibility of hurting someone else’s feelings thru nondiplomatic language use. I’m not. My point is that saying “you are a [bigot or racist or proctomorph or feminist or fascist]” communicates almost nothing–this sentence has no content other than that contained about the speaker. I can say another person is a proctomorph all the livelong day, and what the listener would mostly know is that I am annoyed, very annoyed, at something the person is doing.
I am not trying to devolve discussion into nihilistic subjectivism–on the contrary, I appeal for clear, articulate truth-seeking language. Mostly I can’t know much about another’s motivations, nor their psychological state–so hurling epithets, which on their face are attempting to describe motives or broader belief sets, mostly set off another’s defensive reactions and do little to enable clearer understanding. I can’t see that it amounts to much more than feces-throwing.
I agree that if my intent was to convince others to “voluntarily deliquesce into such a sighing state of impotent, nihilistic subjectivism” then it might, tho’ not necessarily, be a logical extension to say nothing at all. Fortunately for me, that’s not my intent. Thus I will continue happily to discriminate, with meticulosity.
My point is that saying “you are a [bigot or racist or proctomorph or feminist or fascist]” communicates almost nothing–this sentence has no content other than that contained about the speaker.
My good Metanous,
In the world I am familiar with, bigot, racist, feminist, and fascist, though not proctomorph, are all neutrally descriptive terms with objective dimensions of meaning, not merely subjectively determined epithets, although they can also be used as epithets in the same way that the description fat can be hurled at an obese person, nor, once used as an epithet, do they necessarily lose their objective values any more than does an obese person magically lose weight if the term fat is used as an epithet at them. These terms can and are used daily as objectively understood, factionally neutral descriptors among large groups of people with many and varied interests.
The exception, proctomorph, is an epithet, a euphemism coined by our own Wired Sisters for the subjective epithetic “asshole”. Conflating all of these terms you selected equally as merely epithets–bigot, racist, feminist, fascist, proctomorph–does not describe the effective everyday use of language in the world I am familiar with.
However, this disconnection between your grasp of the world and mine is why I am reticent to comment here and seldom do. It is more important that we hear of your and everyone else’s understanding of the world than of mine.
My apologies to the good Cynthesis for disrupting this thread to the extent that I have already.
H. M. Stuart
Alexandria
Well, this explains a lot. In the world with which I am familiar, I rarely hear “bigot”, “racist”, “feminist”, or (and especially) “fascist” used with any precision of meaning at all. And especially not in a neutrally descriptive way.
Are there large groups of people who use these terms to describe themselves? It’s hard to see how such usage can be factionally neutral unless they are equally used by all factions. How can these terms be objectively understood if I am only applying them to others?
I might stretch a point and say that if I call another a “bigot”, I may well be accurate in describing them as one “partial [undefined] to their own group [however defined, e.g. by geography, race, gender, politics, etc.) and intolerant [again, undefined] of those who are not”. jAmerican Heritage Dictionary, 4th ed. This definition is moderately objective, since it is mostly describing behavior. However, hearing another called a racist or feminist or fascist rarely helps me learn much about that person–in the world with which I am familiar.
For example, since “race” itself is a highly problematic word in terms of having any factual content, it’s hard to see how “racist” is going to do much better. Not to mention the many arguments all over teh intertubes and beyond about whether the “communist” regimes of Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al. were really “fascist”. I’d be interested in a glimpse at that other world in which you live, where these (to me) slippery words have factionally neutral, objective meanings well-understood by those who use them and by those to whom they are applied.
“Fascist” has a precise meaning, but often gets used as an epithet in ways that don’t tie much to the historical meaning of the word. I do see “feminist” used in a neutrally descriptive way, though like a lot of ideological words it has a cluster of different meanings, not all of which agree with each other (it’s also the one term of the four mentioned that’s widely used as a self-description). “Racist” and “bigot” do seem to me to have meanings (with some significant difference of opinion as to how far “racist” should apply to personal bad behavior vs. institutions). However, given the strong negative connotations of the words, people who actually are highly partial to their group and intolerant of others find other words than “bigot” to describe themselves, while people who openly argue for the superiority of one race over another tend to reject the word “racist” and call themselves “racialist” or “racial realist” instead. (“Racialist” isn’t too confusing, since everyone I’ve encountered who self-applied the word has, in fact, been racist. “Racial realist” is more confusing, since it actually applies to two directly opposed positions about race, one of which can fairly be described as racist, while the other is not racist at all.)
Now that the term “bigot” has been adequately defined, I would like to take this opportunity to apply the term to myself. I am a bigot, partial to my own group, which to the best of my knowledge consists of ME, and inclined to be intolerant of those who are not in my group, that is, the rest of yez. Sometimes I assume a tolerant stance, for purposes of argument. And sometimes I actually feel sensations of tolerance creeping over me, motivated by affection and interest. But, in the end, I remain a bigot on my own behalf. ; )
Hmm . . . having said that . . . oh dear . . . here I am, sighing toward that voluntary deliquescence of which our Lord of the Helper Monkeys has spoken so eloquently. Although this doesn’t appear in the lexicon, MY idea of bigotry involves not merely intolerance, but a willed opacity to the light of reason. That is, when facts are presented to a candid world, facts that would make a rational entity say “Hmm, perhaps I was wrong about that,” the bigot squeezes his/her eyes shut, stamps his feet and screams “no, no, no, I can’t hear you!” We all make mistaken assumptions and cling to unexamined premises, but only the bigot keeps clinging in the face of sound evidence of their falsity. So, maybe there’s hope that I’m not one after all. Or maybe I’m just defining the word idiosyncratically, and am, after all, a BIGOT about my definitions. I am a feminist (though again, bigoted as to my definition) and alas, I know there are still nuggets of force-fed racism stuck in my craw, much against my will and reason. I’m not, however, a fascist.
I don’t mean to be argumentative*, Sig, but my inner Inigo Montoya wonders: Wouldn’t “curmudgeon” be a better term for what you self-describe?
* Actually, as a self-actuated curmudgeon myself, I am creating an argument… but underneath the mudge is an invitation to join a group that is somewhat larger than the one you define. ;-)
“Proctomorph” is not a euphemism, except in the very narrow sense that it can be used on the record in open court (if the court reporter can spell it), whereas asshole can’t. It means precisely the same thing, and has the added advantage over its Anglo-Saxon cognate of being able to take adjectival and adverbial forms.
Sig, your tentative claim to be a bigot is exactly the position Mr. Wired has taken for many years–that he is a “Mr. Wired chauvinist pig.” But I think that’s mere prejudice, strictly speaking.
“Self-actuated curmudgeon.” Damn! I like that. Is it copyrighted, Franklin?
Self-actuated curmudgeon
Not to be confused with a self-actualized curmudgeon, who, staring out at the surf at Big Sur after throwing cold water at his group therapy encounters at the Esalen Institute in the form of recitations from Bierce and Mencken, bites down hard on his cigar as he resolves to be all that he can be as an unmasker of the utterly malign import of all human effort.
Oo, I was just about to sign on as one of Franklin’s “self-actuated curmudgeons,” but now I’m so torn. I want to stand in the surf and be a self-actualized curmudgeon, too! Decisions, decisions . . . the cigar is kind of deal-breaker, though. I haven’t achieved a degree of enlightenment that would enable me to chomp tobacco with impunity, yet.
Can I stand by the surf and chomp on a candy cigarette? Like the ones they used to have when I was a kid, before, presumably, they were abandoned as corrupting to children?
Having just sported with one of the three standard schools of C20 psychology, the humanist, we should not allow the other two to suffer subpoena envy, so let us recall in turn -
The old joke about the two behaviorists who had sex: “It was good for you. Was it good for me?” – and
The anathema hurled at the Freudians by the creator of the old man in that book by Nabokov (from Strong Opinions):
Let the credulous and the vulgar continue to believe that all mental woes can be cured by a daily application of old Greek myths to their private parts.
Can I stand by the surf and chomp on a candy cigarette? Like the ones they used to have when I was a kid, before, presumably, they were abandoned as corrupting to children?
Commenter Thomas at The Daily Kitten:
have you heard Larry The Cable Guy’s bit on candy cigarettes? He says his sister went through so many of them that he wound up with “secondhand diabetes” from it. Now, you can’t get candy cigs anymore, but we can still get PixieStix:”no, son, don’t pretend to smoke, just do some powder through a straw”!
[grouchy voice] Who says you can’t be both, guldurnit! A self-actuated and -actualized curmudgeon should be elected god of the world, he’d be so wise and powerful… [/gv]
I think I need more coffee. I’ve been exploding my head this morning on a work problem for the last hour.