Nowadays, any manifestation of intellect or breeding is met with suspicion and hostility. From Taki at takimag.com:
I am writing this dispatch from the birthplace of “oracy,” the art of public speaking first perfected by the Athenian Demosthenes, a speaker so eloquent and influential he managed to force the great Aristotle to move back to Macedonia, his birthplace. Demosthenes did not like nor trust northern Greeks like Aristotle and his pupil, one Alexander the Great, the same distrust that many American Southerners felt for the interfering Northerners circa 1861.
Oracy, needless to say, is a skill equal to numeracy and literacy, one mastered at school in my day but, judging by today’s public speakers, no longer taught at any level. Only last week, sitting in a London café, I took out my notebook while three attractive American young women babbled away nonstop. I felt a bit like Henry Higgins in Shaw’s Pygmalion taking down Eliza Doolittle’s cockney outbursts. One of the three women noticed what I was doing and asked me rather coldly why. “I’m counting the times you’re using the word ‘like,’” I answered her. I did not dare tell her I was a linguist—which I am not—because they might have called the fuzz thinking that a linguist is some kind of sexual pervert. Never mind. Let’s get back to oracy and the beauty of eloquent speech.
The great Tom Wolfe once wrote, while reviewing a collection of my writings, that Americans cannot compete with the Brits in public speaking because the latter are examined orally in class, whereas the Yankees write it down. It made sense. Educated Englishmen are above anything else very good speakers. Americans can be, like, like, you know, like…you know, and so on.
So talk about the weather or grunt and grab your genitals at the Fuddruckers.
If your corporate logo is big enough they might consider you edgy and rebellious.
Send a text on your colostomy bag phone when they are sitting two feet away just to show that you are serious.
There were a lot of horns in Jericho as well.
https://www.pccs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/LostToolsOfLearning-DorothySayers.pdf
Having been born in 1955, my education (Canada) was comprised of English, grammar, correct punctuation, spelling contests, literature, Shakespeare’s plays (I acted the part of Portia in The Merchant of Venice), French (I am bi-lingual), classic fairy tales, the Classics and two of my teachers taught long hand writing which I continue to employ today as I prefer it to printing. We had geography, history, maths, reading assignments and book analysis, public speaking, films (both in school and out), music (I played three instruments), art, physical education and health classes. To have taken a calculator into an exam would have been an immediate failure. I sometimes wonder how many students in today’s age would fare in such a milieu.
I am an autodidact and, consequently, have a freedom of thought very few possess.
Gwyneth