“People who would sneer at the vulgarian . . .”

Steven Pinker writes,

Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics.

This statement of the form, “if A, then B,” is hard to evaluate since, strictly speaking, it’s true if A is the empty set. Will “the average educated person” reallly sneer at the vulgarian etc? All the time I’m sneering at the vulgarians who use tables instead of graphs, but, hey, that’s my job. I sneer at the people who sneer at the people who sneer at the vulgarians.

5 thoughts on ““People who would sneer at the vulgarian . . .”

  1. OK, I got it. Vulgarians are citizens of Vulgaria. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vulgaria. Either that, or they are "United Nations peacekeeping troops from Bulgaria who especially liked to flirt, and in some cases sexually harass, the local female population in Cambodia" (same wiki article). In both cases they are eminently sneer-worthy (even if they use figures).

    BTW, I am definitely a Vulgarian because I use tables instead of figures. Reason: Linguistics journals (especially) are unable to reliably print figures as intended.

  2. It seems a bit of a stretch to think that the average educated person will consider Virginia Woolf to be in the literary canon.

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