let's leave the neanderthals at home
/When you spend a lot of time with your housemates, as we did during the worst of Covid, there comes a time when the two of you, or all of you, simply don’t agree.
In which case, a well-placed word could go a long way. It may go a long way in the wrong direction however, and it may have legs that will follow you for quite an annoying time. Your housemates may not like what you called them.
For example, a Luddite.
Because Ray and I were having a so-called discussion, and I was accusing him of being narrow-minded and backward, and he was accusing me of being a pain in the neck, I called him this old-fashioned word. Which led him to look up the definition and discover the Luddite in the house is really me because it means the kind of person who would rather write in pen and ink than fire up the computer. A Luddite is officially someone who shuns new technology, named after English workers who did just that.
I was using it all wrong. He doesn’t shun technology; he shuns plain common sense.
He followed this remark by calling me a doofus and a goofus, always available for people who are too lazy, I point out, to search for a more appropriate and cutting word. They’re namby-pamby terms like half-wit or yo-yo, someone extraordinarily dumb, to which, in the maturity and acceptance I gained from spending a year glued to him afraid to leave the house, I called him a Neanderthal.
I did this because I read that people of European descent still have 2% Neanderthal DNA inside them, which -- as a Luddite -- I believe he uses on a regular basis to show he’s smarter than me because he can do something like sharpen a knife. I tell him this is an obsolete hunter-gatherer activity and anyway we should have removed all the knives from the house this year.
Which made him call me a bore, defined as a dull and tiresome person who provides nothing interesting to say.
Blah, blah, blah, babble, babble, babble, is all I can think of in response.
Most of the year though we kept things pretty copesetic. But not always. Or some of the time. Sometimes never.
Certainly not, I point out, when he acted like a plain, ordinary clod which I could finally say once we had vaccine on board, and we could get out of the house. After, it seems, we deconstruct the topic of how well we got along with a newfound freedom we didn’t dare display earlier in the year when it was too risky because we were stuck.
Looking up the official definition of clod, I see this sentence as an example: “You are an insensitive clod and I hope you fall and break your neck.”
I point out that I didn’t say that, the dictionary did, so don’t blame me.
He counters with Philistine, which he knows will really get under my skin because I’m nothing like that old neighbor Phyllis who was quite a dolt. Philistine, he reads on his phone as he shakes his head, is actually a sophisticated trash word, and all this time I’d been using it wrong too.
He reads this: In the fields of philosophy and aesthetics, the derogatory term philistinism describes the manners, habits, and character of a person whose anti-intellectual social attitude undervalues and despises art and beauty, spirituality and intellect.
Stop talking about yourself I say, it’s rude, egotistical and by the way sickening to which he says “maybeIambutwhataboutyou,” then sticks out his tongue and wiggles his thumbs in his ears as I turn away to leave the house.
And I go, I finally can go. I leave the house free and easy, good riddance chump. But before I drive off, I ask what kind of takeout I should pick up for dinner.