Back when I was big stuff National Review did a cover story attacking me. Their biggest criticism was to compare me to Babbitt, of the 1920s book by the same name, saying “Produce, produce!” They were upset at my attacking academics as worthless. People like Buckley, who considered untranslated Latin or French as the height of sophistication, didn’t appreciate the putdown.

They looked upon me as unlike them and more like Babbitt, the unapologetic middle-class businessman whom the largely Marxist Intellectuals lampooned. Well, they got that right.

I got a bit of that here when I said that the Germans have no long words. Their long words are a combination of short words to describe something. Temperaturwechselfbestandigkeit looks like a long word. Actually it is literally temperature change withstanding. It is what we call a refractory, which is a material which withstands large temperature changes.

There used to be a feature on an old magazine making fun of this. It was supposed to be an German grandfather saying short words to describe things this way. The only comments I got on that piece were come repetitions of this kind of humor.

This is what I call Shrewd. People make fun of this German stringing together of simple words. The really Shrewd thing to do, they say, is to do exactly the same thing, but to translate it into GREEK. So if someone said “terrible lizard,” it would be a German grandfather joke.

But if you say dinosaur, it becomes Highly Sophisticated. You can’t say King Tyrant, but Tyrannaurus Rex is Smart!

That was the sort of Babbitry National Review saw in my writings.

I have an ingrained Anglo-Saxon distrust of anyone who makes a living by inventing big words. In my day a sociology course consisted entirely of learning a battery of enormous words. Political Correctness may dislike words like “crippled” because they degrade the disabled, who usually refer to themselves as the disabled. But you can also make a fat living by inventing terms like “differently abled,” debating them in journals, and imposing them on the public.

What would a lawyer do for a living if he didn’t spend his life looking up Opinions for which there is no more justifications than any other Opinions? What would a preacher do for sermons if he only had the directives Jesus gave, the Golden Rule and loving God?

And National Review could hardly dazzle anybody with its recitation of Great Society platitudes. Its pretense to the Uppah Clahss is all it’s got.

To the average Shrewd person, the moron who thinks he’s smart, a lawyer who can quote the cases is on the same par as an engineer who fills the blackboard with equations. The only difference is that all that lawyer’s time is absolutely worthless, worse than worthless, while the engineer can build something enormously valuable.

No one seems to notice this tiny difference. The Commentariat talks to itself in big words instead.