evening_tsar (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
evening_tsar) wrote2025-07-10 02:44 pm
evening_tsar) wrote2025-07-10 02:44 pm
(no subject)
Mea culpa:
Pertaining to my previous post, it tuns out neither Ambrose Bierce, nor Gustav Flaubert wrote “[Patriotism] is the belief that one’s own country is best because one was born in it.” as I asserted, at least not in the sources I assumed.
What Bierce did write, in his Devil’s Dictionary from 1906, was that patriotism was “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.” He went on to define a “patriot” as “One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and tool of conquerors.”
So not exactly what I remembered, but still relevant to the discussion, and even more viciously skeptical.
In 1911, Gustav Flaubert’s released his own dictionary – The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas , based on conversations he overheard in drawing room parties. While not as angry as The Devil’s Dictionary, it is, for my money, much funnier, not least because these are things actual people apparently said. Alas, it has no entry for “patriotism”: nearest I could find was “Political Economy”, defined as “Dismal Science”.
Go figure.
Pertaining to my previous post, it tuns out neither Ambrose Bierce, nor Gustav Flaubert wrote “[Patriotism] is the belief that one’s own country is best because one was born in it.” as I asserted, at least not in the sources I assumed.
What Bierce did write, in his Devil’s Dictionary from 1906, was that patriotism was “Combustible rubbish ready to the torch of anyone ambitious to illuminate his name.” He went on to define a “patriot” as “One to whom the interests of a part seem superior to those of the whole. The dupe of statesmen and tool of conquerors.”
So not exactly what I remembered, but still relevant to the discussion, and even more viciously skeptical.
In 1911, Gustav Flaubert’s released his own dictionary – The Dictionary of Accepted Ideas , based on conversations he overheard in drawing room parties. While not as angry as The Devil’s Dictionary, it is, for my money, much funnier, not least because these are things actual people apparently said. Alas, it has no entry for “patriotism”: nearest I could find was “Political Economy”, defined as “Dismal Science”.
Go figure.