>> Ancient Greek for the masses ('the many') - used to
>> indicate the Great Unwashed.
>> We did this a year ago or so - try and pay attention! :-)
This kind of condescension goes back much further.
Forty years ago, while doing homework at Boston Public
Library's reading room for its closed-stack collection, my
feeble attempt to turn high-school diligence into teen-age
dissipation was to call up every book on photography instead
of whatever I was supposed to be working on.
I remember one densely-prosed book, (I think about
photographic aesthetics) by an titled British gentleman
published around 1880 whose preface has a phrase along the
lines of "... I could have ...[taken some different
approach]... but to have pursued that course would have been
to condescend to [two words typeset in Greek]"
I went over to a classmate in the reading room, who took
Ancient Greek, and asked him to translate. With a quick
glance, he laughed and said "'Hoi Poloi' - I guess the author
didn't want to insult you by implying that you couldn't read
Greek."
You may have already come to some impression about the
arrogance of that Victorian author, but I want to make a
totally different point: Yes, not only did my high school
have its students to do work at one of the world's major
research libraries, but it also taught the classics in their
original Latin AND Greek.
Suck on that all you Hoi Poloi out there!
----- Larry Woods
lmwoods@xxxxxxx
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