“Keen”, in the sense of “wailing in lamentation for the dead”, is one of my favorite verbs, and I use it probably a little too often. It’s not the most common verb, but it’s not unheard of in a poetic or gothic fiction context. Most people recognize it at least vaguely.
Anyway, a few years ago, I was taking a fiction writing class, and I had a peer who really really did not believe that “keen” was a verb at all. In her crits of my work, she underlined it whenever it appeared and wrote “not a verb”. I ignored this the first few times because whatever, how likely was it to come up, but on her crit of my final story, she underlined it three times and wrote “AAHH! not a verb, [my name]!!!”
This just would not do. I literally sat up that night stewing over the fact that this girl, who was a genuinely talented writer, had not bothered to take two seconds to look up this word she had some weird vendetta against. The next day was the last day of class, and I walked in knowing I would never have another chance to set this straight. I’m not terribly proud of the lengths I went to here, but I borrowed someone’s phone (I didn’t have one at the time), looked up the word “keen”, and went “hey, [her name]? can I show you something?”
She scrolled down the page, and then she looked up at me and said in literally the most syrupy sweet voice possible, “wow, this is really bothering you.”
I went back to my seat and we said no more of the matter. And that is the story of one of the most utterly infuriating moments in my entire life.
Oooh I’ve had so many moments like this. Where people know less than you, but the Dunning-Kruger is strong and it never even occurs to them that maybe you know something they don’t. Bonus points if this is because of arrogance–like “I have a higher rank/more experience than you, so my ego will not allow for the possibility that there might be SOME LACUNA in my omniscience that you do not also possess.” Because there’s no such thing as specialization, right?
Usually, when I feel I know something but I don’t know WHY I know it, I at least allow for the possibility that I’m wrong. This has actually led to me being steamrolled by wrong people who had no such scruples, so I try and not completely knuckle under either. But it is only when I know precisely why I know something, when I can cite sources, that I am adamant.
If everybody used this heuristic, no one would ever be loudly, insistently, condescendingly wrong ever again! It would be impossible–because if they could cite their sources, they might still be condescending, but they’d be condescendingly right. And that sort of thing bothers me a lot less.
My mom has a story like this. She worked at a place where–I won’t say the name, but–pedagogy and publishing intersected. And at one point, one of her co-workers started talking about two movies based on Marcel Pagnol novels: My Mother’s Glory and My Father’s Castle. Except, as same of you may know, those aren’t the titles–she got it backwards. The mistake was a classic argument to authority–the co-worker had heard the president of the foundation make the same mix-up, and refused to believe somebody like that could get anything wrong. Total deference, the epistemological equivalent of jumping off a bridge when your friends do it. There was no way to reason with her, not even by saying “Okay, but I’ve seen the movies, and I can explain in detail what the FATHER’S glory refers to, and why the MOTHER has a castle.” So she did basically what Skye did–confronted her with the evidence. She just walked in one day with a bunch of books she was bringing in for some work-related thing–I forget what it was, but she managed to include My Father’s Glory and My Mother’s Castle. And she started naming all the titles, and was eventually like, “OH, and here are those Pagnol books we were talking about! 🙂 🙂 :)”
Similar things happened to me when I worked as a counselor at a French immersion sleepaway camp one summer. I was 20 and had zero experience, so despite the fact that I spoke possibly the best non-native French of almost anyone on the staff (I do not say this to brag; I was a terrible counselor in many ways–I don’t have the temperament for it, so I did my best but I lacked the stamina, resilience and forbearance of many of my peers. I was emotionally available to the kids, that wasn’t the problem, but I just was not an ideal counselor. And the administration of the camp really disliked me, but even THEY said my French was the best they’d ever seen in a non-native speaker. I was good at that and bad at everything else) I was very low in the pecking order–just a generic counselor, teaching passively by contributing to the immersion experience, where the older counselors taught actual classes to the intensive campers.
Being at that camp was already a pretty frustrating experience–the way things were run was very groupthinky, very heavy on esprit de corps at the expense of individuality, and the atmosphere was oddly anti-intellectual (high-achieving students were seen as a nuisance because they might intimidate the less-motivated kids–think of the scene at the beginning of the Gilliam adaptation of Baron von Munchausen where a soldier, played by Sting, is executed not for cowardice but for valor. And some of the counselors didn’t even TRY to improve their [own–not that of the kids] accents or their grammar, and claimed that some of their mistakes didn’t need to be corrected because it was “part of the culture of the camp.” As though their fucking lazy mistakes were undergoing a creolization process.). I was not well-liked by most of my fellow counselors–they left me out of their photos, that kind of snubbing. So the cliqueishness and snobbery of the higher-ranking staff went kind of unnoticed by me, until it was time to contradict them.
We were at the laundromat, killing time while our clothes were being washed, when I overheard one of them say to the other “Where was Jean Valjean in prison, anyway?”
Yes, I know it wasn’t my conversation. But stronger people than I have yielded to temptations like that. I told them–obviously–that he had gone to prison in Toulon.
“No,” one of them said–probably the other one, but who knows, it could have been the question-asker too. “I think it was Marseille.”
“No, no, I get why you think that, but I know for a fact it’s Toulon. The bagne of Toulon.” Providing more detail. Maybe this will show I know what I’m talking about.
“Nah…Marseille.” That syrupy voice, yes. “Let the grownups talk, sweetie,” she may as well have said.
“IT WAS TOULON. JEAN VALJEAN COMMITTED THEFT AND ACCORDINGLY WAS SENTENCED TO HARD LABOR AT THE BAGNE OF TOULON, A PARANAVAL PENAL INSTITUTION THAT REPLACED GALLEY SLAVERY IN 1748 AND WAS ITSELF REPLACED BY DEPORTATION IN 1873. YOU ARE THINKING OF EDMOND DANTÈS, WHO WAS IMPRISONED AT THE CHATEAU D’IF, WHICH IS IN MARSEILLE. THE CHATEAU D’IF WAS FOR POLITICAL PRISONERS, THERE IS NO WAY ANYONE WOULD HAVE BEEN SENT THERE FOR STEALING A LOAF OF BREAD”
JFC, AT LEAST ASK ME WHY I AM MAKING THE CLAIMS I AM MAKING. I *MIGHT* BE ABLE TO BACK IT UP
enormous mood
two types of facts: the ones that I know and you don’t, which are obviously Important, and the ones that you know and I don’t, which are obviously trivial nonsense that any reasonable person would be embarrassed to have studied.
that fucking feel when.
Published
fadeslikewhispers 