[lbo-talk] "tool" as insult?

Shane Mage shmage at pipeline.com
Tue Sep 11 20:53:50 PDT 2012


On Sep 11, 2012, at 11:39 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:


>
> On Sep 11, 2012, at 11:32 PM, 123hop at comcast.net wrote:
>
>> It seems that the implication is that the "tool" is stupid. Or is
>> it that it's being manipulated by someone?
>
> Means you're the passive or inert instrument of a higher or more
> powerful intelligence.
>
> Also, evokes "dick." Reminds me of that great letter to National
> Lampoon in the mid-70s, signed by Yvor Winters, disclosing that T.S.
> Eliot stirred his coffee with his tool.

Hegel said, somewhere, that the cruelest insult is to refer to someone as a "type." ex: "factchecking a bourgeois type"

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things." Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64



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