"Sci-Fi’s Difficult Genius", Peter Bebergal

Jeffery Wilson clueland.com · 26 Apr 2015, 00:58 · from 2015-April.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at clueland.com (Jeffery Wilson clueland.com)
Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2015 19:58:13 -0500
Subject: (urth)
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On 4/24/2015 3:08 PM, Dan'l Danehy-Oakes wrote:
> I've always wondered about that phrase, "unwashed Philistines." Is there
> any reason to believe that Philistines bathed less frequently than their
> neighbors?
>
> Inquiring minds want to know.

I believe it is a compound insult, drawing from Bulwer-Lytton's "the 
great unwashed" and the secondary sense of unrefined and uneducated that 
arose from a minister's metephorical use of "the Philistines are upon 
us" during a time of bad sentiment between the townsfolk and the 
scholars of Johannesburg a couple centuries ago.


-- 
Jeff Wilson - < jwilson at clueland.com >
A&M Texarkana Computational Intelligence Lab
< http://www.tamut.edu/cil >

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