Food snobbery
This article in Slate a couple days ago really cut to the core of me.
“And nowhere are the wine snobs more insufferable than in the comparatively low-income, tweedy precincts of university humanities departments”
I need to take a long look in the mirror and reflect on whether or not I’ll be able to stand the image I’ll project as a liberal arts college professor with a food and wine blog. F.
pvaldesolo
elizabethbb
May 1, 2008 at 8:07 pm
I couldn’t agree with this quotation more. Most of all, I agree with the fact that it is restricted to humanities departments, and does not include science departments.
Humanities departments, like wine snobs, are all about seeming to be profound, without all the tedium of actually being profound. Just think about the qualitative similarity between the following two sentences:
1. Humanities: “I found his analysis of the use of the oboe in liturgical music during the reign of Louis XIV to be stimulating, yet cursory.”
2. Oenology: “I found the aftertaste of the vast majority of the 1998 Sonoma pinots to be circumlocutory, yet phrasmotic.”
Just in case you missed some of the more obvious similarities, here are two of them: (i) both sentences deal with subjects about which reasonable people don’t care; (ii) both sentences don’t mean anything (in fact, I just made up the word “phrasmotic”).
Science, on the other hand, ignores such intellectual frippery and concerns itself with what really matters. Note: in the context of oenology, “what really matters” is getting drunk.
I will leave it up to others to determine whether the so-called “social sciences” deserve to be counted among the rarefied and lofty pursuits of science or among the dilettante mental masturbation of the humanities.
May 2, 2008 at 11:50 am
All I can say is check these out:
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/81-graduate-school/
AND
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/01/25/24-wine/