Only Luddites don’t know what Luddites are!

Sheila has just encountered a word for the first time. The word is “Luddite”.

Reading her post, I’m struck by a couple of things. First, I agree with her that a lot of times the “intelligent folks” can get really condescending and arrogant, although I’m not sure if that’s the case with the William Gibson article she links (it’s an AOL-only article, which makes me lazy since I’m an AOL subscriber but I didn’t care to sign in to read it). And “Luddite” has definitely taken on a connotation of “enlightened dismissal”; it’s commonly meant to be an insult.

However, I was surprised that Sheila had not encountered the word until relatively recently (within the last year). I know that she reads and writes a lot (man, does she write a lot!), but maybe she doesn’t read the kind of stuff where the word “Luddite” comes into play. Similarly, I suspect that a lot of medical terminology that she knows fairly well would be totally alien to me, a guy whose medical vocabulary derives from watching a lot of ER and CSI. It’s a fairly common error to assume that certain things that are common knowledge in our experience are also common knowledge outside that sphere of experience. (This is also part of why I don’t believe that “common sense” really exists.)

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