Cognac-tive. Rui Correia wrote:
... academics who saw themselves as smart. But they often lack social skills.... Rui: so now I can at least deduct cognitive points from so-called intellectuals I meet at conferences who swash and sway their cutlery at dinner tables as part of the argumentative toolkit, or interrupt you mid-word to interject with their mouths full ... PS: shouldn't it be 'cognitive'? J
A large portion of the management people I worked with when I was driving truck and working in industrial jobs couldn't spell past a. 6th or 7th grade level. They knew the rough, and generally accepted meanings of large words (used 3 times in a sentence for practice), and how to use a spellchecker, often with confusing or hilarious results. (yeah, they were dumb (or lazy) enough to let MSWord suggest contextual replacements...) Many machine shops and other industrial organizations (like the computer industry) require the ability to write reports as one of the prerequisites for flunky 'technician' jobs, because honestly many of the engineers couldn't write an intelligible report if their job depended on it (and it didn't). When I asked my boss, the transportation supervisor at BadWill, how these people, as functionally illiterate as they seemed to be, came to make $60,000 & up a year, while I was busting hump for $9.00/hr, he looked at me dolefully and said... "Because they're 'creative'.." No they weren't, they were "baccalaureated with a 'B-' " hacks... but I'm sure thats what they tell themselves in the mirror every morning. IOW, I believe there's some connection between 'elitism', self-aggrandizment, and aggrandizing others... AKA sucking up.... brown nosing. Must be a social (mobility) disease. Leigh Disclaimer: No spellcheckers were used in the creation of this post (Just my 'formal' 9th grade NYC public school education.)
