The Misanthrope’s Corner

“CLASSIST,” you may recall, is a neologism meaning someone who makes judgments based on social class. It’s a perfectly good ist, no better and no worse than any of our other ists,-ites, and phobes, but it never quite caught on. The only people who use it are the Marxist-feminist lunatic fringe and far-out black ranters who get on a roll and can’t stop. To the latter, “classist” is a code word for whites who use “underclass” as a code word for blacks.

Everyone else has problems with it. In the first place, it’s hard to pronounce and turns into a squirty hiss, tempting ableists to assume a speech defect and go through a drying-off pantomime. In the second place, the people who would normally use it—liberal intellectuals—have a mental block against it. As members of the class laboriously known as “four or more years of higher education,” they have already learned that a “classicist” is a specialist in Greek and Roman literature. Try as they might, they can’t shake that extra syllable: “classist” simply sounds wrong to them, the product of a typing error like the inevitable “feminity” for femininity.

About the Author

Florence King

Florence King was a contributing editor of National Review.

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“CLASSIST,” you may recall, is a neologism meaning someone who makes judgments based on social class. It’s a perfectly good ist, no better and no worse than any of our other ists,-ites, and phobes, but it never quite caught on. The only people who use it are the Marxist-feminist lunatic fringe and far-out black ranters who get on a roll and can’t stop. To the latter, “classist” is a code word for whites who use “underclass” as a code word for blacks.

Everyone else has problems with it. In the first place, it’s hard to pronounce and turns into a squirty hiss, tempting ableists to assume a speech defect and go through a drying-off pantomime. In the second place, the people who would normally use it—liberal intellectuals—have a mental block against it. As members of the class laboriously known as “four or more years of higher education,” they have already learned that a “classicist” is a specialist in Greek and Roman literature. Try as they might, they can’t shake that extra syllable: “classist” simply sounds wrong to them, the product of a typing error like the inevitable “feminity” for femininity.