The Misanthrope’s Corner

OF all the self-defeating things Americans do, our practice of renaming eternal verities to make them sound more user-friendly wins the booby prize.

Like all societies, we acknowledge the need for certain people to “set an example” so that others will have someone to “look up to,” but we don’t dare put it that way. Instead we call them “role models,” a compound now so deeply embedded in our cliché lobes that no one stops to think that both words connote superficiality, ephemerality, and pretense.