Can anyone provide a definition for
Sep. 26th, 2012 11:24 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kestrellphilocretinism?
I include the context at length because it is just so delicious. The setting is an annual conference of Poe scholars.
block quote start
In Stockholm, the Argentinian had called the German a racist and a Euromaniac; the German had accused him of philocretinism. Intellectual controversies tend to be like dog fights without the teeth, in which the barking not the biting does the damage. In the case of Rotkopf and Urquiza, however, according to the report in The Gold-Bug, they had very nearly come to bites. So much so that Oliver Johnson had to break off his discussion of Poe's influence on
Lovecraft - in which he defended the revolutionary theory that a supposed twentieth-century invention of Lovecraft's the Necronomicon or book of dead names, was, in fact, an esoteric code dating back to the beginning of time and to which Poe had already made cryptic references - and leave the stage, with Rotkopf congratulating him, saying that every time an imbecile stopped talking, the intellectual climate on Earth improved slightly.
Oliver Johnson had sworn to kill Joachim Rotkopf one day, and Rotkopf and Urquiza had continued their argument in the pages of The Gold-Bug, in a series of increasingly vitriolic articles, which I had followed with fascination, never dreaming that I would one day hear those magnificent, erudite dogs trading insults for real.
block quote end
_Borges and the Eternal Orangutans_, pp. 16-17, by Luis Fernando Verissimo
I include the context at length because it is just so delicious. The setting is an annual conference of Poe scholars.
block quote start
In Stockholm, the Argentinian had called the German a racist and a Euromaniac; the German had accused him of philocretinism. Intellectual controversies tend to be like dog fights without the teeth, in which the barking not the biting does the damage. In the case of Rotkopf and Urquiza, however, according to the report in The Gold-Bug, they had very nearly come to bites. So much so that Oliver Johnson had to break off his discussion of Poe's influence on
Lovecraft - in which he defended the revolutionary theory that a supposed twentieth-century invention of Lovecraft's the Necronomicon or book of dead names, was, in fact, an esoteric code dating back to the beginning of time and to which Poe had already made cryptic references - and leave the stage, with Rotkopf congratulating him, saying that every time an imbecile stopped talking, the intellectual climate on Earth improved slightly.
Oliver Johnson had sworn to kill Joachim Rotkopf one day, and Rotkopf and Urquiza had continued their argument in the pages of The Gold-Bug, in a series of increasingly vitriolic articles, which I had followed with fascination, never dreaming that I would one day hear those magnificent, erudite dogs trading insults for real.
block quote end
_Borges and the Eternal Orangutans_, pp. 16-17, by Luis Fernando Verissimo
no subject
Date: 2012-09-26 08:04 pm (UTC)It was also once used more broadly to describe the severely mentally retarded; in this context the IQ of a cretin is somewhere in the 30-50 range. (In this categorization scheme, a moron would be in the 50-70 range and an idiot would be in the 70-90 range, if I'm remembering correctly.)
Philo- is a prefix meaning "strongly preferring; loving." (Hence "philosophy," a love of thinking.)
So philocretinism means an affinity for extreme stupidity. It's a fancy way of saying "you have dumb ideas."