People, I would like to introduce you to a self-professed "Intellect":

She calls herself "Owl". Here is a sampling of her literary jewels:

"The Empirical Self of each of us is all that he is tempted to call by the name of me. But it is clear that between what a man calls me and what he simply calls mine the line is difficult to draw. We feel and act about certain things that are ours very much as we feel and act about ourselves. Our fame, our children, the work of our hands, may be as dear to us as our bodies are, and arouse the same feelings and the same acts of reprisal if attacked. And our bodies themselves, are they simply ours, or are they us?"

One might say that this is incomprehensible drivel. One might go so far as to say that she doesn't know how to write, if writing is about coherently communicating thought. But then, one might say that the Emporer's clothes were his birthday suit. And one wouldn't want to be revealed as "not getting it".

I once knew a guy who stole just under $ 1,000,000 from from some trusting investors. Curious as to how this might have gone down, I did a quick google search and found the answers in the publicly filed litigation papers. He had solicited his marks by faxing them a proposal that communicated no coherent thought at all. My knee-jerk reaction was, "Wow, he was intelligent, way beyond my comprehension," but then it occurred to me: it wasn't that he was intelligent at all; rather, it was that he concocted something that made no sense and sent it to people hoping that they would feel insecure about not being able to understand what he was saying.

He COUNTED on these people believing that "If I can't understand what I am reading, then I must be stupid. And the guy who wrote it must be really really smart."

And the wallets flew open.

People are smarter than they realize they are, except for the few posers out there who pass as "Intellects" by peppering their paragraphs with five-syllable words that don't generally see the light of day outside of the SATs. Those people are far less smart than they seem and a little less smart than they think they are.

Pompously mangling sentence construction does not an "Intellect" make.

YC

UPDATED: yes, I now know that Owl lifted the quoted text from William James, and I note that my failure to comprehend that ALL of her text was attributed to James speaks volumes about (a) Owl's communication skills and (b) her propensity to plagiarize. Indeed, Owl plagiarized me yesterday, specifically the comment made above about "pompous mangling of sentence construction". I described her writing as such, and she proceeded to use my exact words on her own blog, without attribution. Anyway, here is a sample of what I believe to be Owl's own words, although you never know. They could be someone else's:

"In that context, light waves that move exactly like water across tree leaves is sense pleasure. Undulation, beautiful shapes, colors. The senses mix with emotions and thoughts: delight in body and company, plus a knowledge that all this is special in time and place: the experience is historically unique, so I mark it as precious. An aesthetically perfect moment, a collector’s item."

Owl takes herself seriously, of this much I am certain.

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