Acephalous

"And there still would have been the Holocaust..."

Few write on the history of evolutionary theory as compellingly as John Wilkins. (Had his Species: the History of an Idea and Defining Species: a Sourcebook from Antiquity to Today been available in 2002, I could've avoided years of thankless legwork and finished my dissertation with normative time to spare. Not that I'm bitter.) So I can think of no better way to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the publication of the Origin than to listen to Wilkins speculate about what would have happened had it never existed. My only qualm is with this paragraph:

Lamarckism, by which I mean the progressivist view of evolution, not the “acquired inheritance” version that has little to do directly with Lamarck and anyway is set up as a contrast with Weismann not Darwin, would have played an even greater role in people’s thinking than it did. It may still be with us now—we would be trying to figure out how progress occurs out of necessity, rather than it being the rather odd view of people like Conway Morris.

I think scholars who focus more on the scientific literature underestimate the popular appeal of what amounts to quasi-Lamarckian thought both then and now ... but then again, as I'm the person who wrote my dissertation, I would.

"Good passage in French on what dogs dream when awake."

That being what I wanted to name my contribution to the book event on Jenny Davidson's Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century, not because it's relevant, but because it's my favorite entry in the Darwin notebook I cited in the post.  You're welcome to comment on the post here or at The Valve, but I don't want to reproduce it over here and risk confusing the search engines as to the location of the event.

Internalizing Other's Marms May Be Hazardous To Your Health

Consider the following sentence from George Levine's Darwin Loves You:

"Who," asks Max Weber, "who—aside from certain big children who are indeed found in the natural sciences—still believes that the findings of astronomy, biology, physics, or chemistry could teach us anything about the meaning of the world?" (33).

It summoned my Inner Soltan.*  Did Weber really write:

Who who—aside from certain big children ...

Of course he didn't.  But I'll be damned if that second "who" didn't trip my alarms.  Why?  Because it doesn't exist!  Levine has committed academic fraud!  He inserted into the sentence a word which did not appear in the original!  I know what you're thinking: "Scott, he did it for the sake of elegance."  I agree.  The correct version is ugly:

"Who," asks Max Weber, "[w]ho—aside from certain big children ... "

But it has the benefit of being correct.  The incorrect version is merely superior prose and that's something for with up which I'll never stand put.

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*I recommend an Inner Soltan to anyone in a field in which the deportment of words is important.  It pre-analyzes your prose and suggests the revisions required to keep the actual Soltan at bay.  Very handy. 

Please Direct Your Eyes to Our Quality Website

We really need the ad revenue.

(What?  The only alternative is that the BBC decided to fire its editors overnight.  Can you think of another scenario in which that slips through?)

New Goal in Life:

To be the first person to cite an article from Homing News and Pigeon Fanciers' Journal in a dissertation submitted in an English department.*

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* Francis Galton's "Notes on Fitting Normal Curves to Distributions of Speeds of Old Homing Pigeons" (6 April 1894): 159-60.  That my discussion will focus on the shuffleboarders of the homing pigeon community is pure gravy.  Sadly, no one has thought to upload the "PASSENGER PIGEONS!" scene from Ghost Dog and my copy is VHS, so this is the most pigeon I can muster.

An Exercise in Understatement*

On why we should study the minute changes of papillary ridges to learn about human development, according to Francis Galton:

We know nothing by observation about the persistence of any internal character, because it is not feasible to dissect a man in his boyhood, and a second or third time in his later life.  ("Discontinuity in Evolution" 366)

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*I almost titled this post "Something Something Something NAZIS!"  Then I remembered how tedious debates about Darwinism/Eugenics/National Socialism tend to be and thought better of it.

In What World Is This Considered Acceptable?

Badly executed theory is responsible for 99.99 percent of instances in which I stare mouth-agape at an academic article.  The other 0.01 percent is when I read something like this in a 1980 Taxon article on "Cladistics in Botany":

One only has to attend a symposium on classification with cladists to discover that in any given case there is usually no consensus of opinion as to what chosen character is apomorphic and which is not; the reason why there is disagreement is that a certain number of works have a certain classification "in their heads" already and, perhaps subconsciously, anticipate the result of a cladistic procedure.  Other biologists disagree because they have something else in mind.  This brings me to another nigger in the wood pile: what is character?  (emphasis mine)

Not the technical answer the author wants, but my definition would include something about resisting the urge to refer to a critical lacuna as "another nigger in the wood pile."  It might even extend to thinking the phrase itself offensive on its face, such that it ought not be thought, much less submitted to peer review. 

How Go the Revisions?

An article I read while revising the Before Adam section of my London chapter informed me:

The pitfall trap is an adaptation of of hunting techniques that dates back to primitive man.  It consist of a plastic cup with a funnel.

I don't buy it ... but I came this close to citing it in my final draft.  I may need sleep.

I Write like Mullets; or, this Post is not about Fish ...

... but it could've been.*  (Consider your blessings counted.)

This post is about 19th Century hubris.  The following was written about somebody:

He was a tolerably good observer and compiler, and surpassed ordinary men, perhaps, in ability to embody in words the results of his observations of various disconnected facts.

Name!  That!  Tolerably-Good-Observer! 

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*I also could've written about Darwin's cheeky marginalia, of which I've enjoyed quite more than I can bear today.  That post would have been about fishes, and would've included this excerpt from G.R. Waterhouse's 9 August 1843 letter to Darwin:

But as the term "natural" certainly has a very vague meaning when thus used, I have no objection to apply the word "useful" instead—But as the word natural for a kind of classification I merely follow others—it is no doubt presumptuous.

Darwin's response?

However different another sex or larva is we call it one species, when we know descent.—When we do not hesitate to call Amphioxus Fish.—

Young Charles is perturbed.  (In my first draft he was "upset," then I remembered he was English.)  Amphioxus is not a fish.  Don't believe me?  Ask my pretentious dissertation:

To Paulina’s question—"Is it a fish?"—[T.H.] Huxley would answer that as "it conforms to the Vertebrate type ... I can see no reason for removing it from the class Pisces."  But conformation to the vertebrate type is different from being, in an ontological sense, a vertebrate, as Huxley everywhere admits in his proposal.  He enumerates the structures in the amphioxus homologous, not identical, to those in vertebrates.  His identification here is typical: "that part of the cerebro-spinal axis of Amphioxus which lies in front of the seventh myotome answers to the preauditory part of the brain in the higher Vertebrata, and the corresponding part of the head to the trabecular region of the skull in them."  The presence of these homologues in the amphioxus is certainly significant—it demonstrates that the animal is related to the progenitor of what Ernst Haeckel [elsewhere] called "the whole stem"—but it does not warrant its inclusion in the stem itself, and as Wharton knew, there is a fundamental problem with any classificatory system which would include the amphioxus among the class Pisces.

All this almost-but-not-quite-a-fish-talk titillates, doesn't it?

It doesn't?  I expect you'll complain about the post-to-footnote ratio too now.  As much as I'd like to put the bulk of my prose in the body of what I write, I can't help but live in the footnotes.  My body graphs uniformly fail to inspire, but that's only because I write like mullets: business up front, party in the rear! 

(Make of that what you will.)

(Only not too much.  This is a family blog.)

You People Suck

Remember a few (months longer than I remembered them being) back when I asked whether I'd knocked your socks off? 

Remember how I played up the interdisciplinary awesomeness of all things blogs?  Then how I did it again a few months later with some folks up at Davis?

I take it all back. 

The punchline to the Wharton introduction was supposed to be that the famous metaphysical philosopher's true talent lay in the biological sciences.  He'd discovered the importance of amphioxus notochords long before anyone else thought to look at them ... but because my head's jammed full of junk, I missed the significance of Wharton's reference. 

The amphioxus was not just some fish—it was an important fish-type-thing.  Possibly the most important fish-type-thing of the late 19th Century. 

Why? 

Because the amphioxus had long been considered one of those all-important missing links.  To quote the I-can't-emphasize-his-importance-enough-type-person Ernst Haeckel—referenced by Wharton in the very paragraph I cite—the amphioxus is important "because it fills the deep gulf between the Invertebrates and the Vertebrates" (76).*

The amphioxus is—quite literally—a liminal figure in the history of science.  Given that my argument in this chapter concerns Wharton's reluctance to wed any particular evolutionary theory because of the excess of liminal figures and ambiguous conclusions, I find your silence on the issue quite alarming.

You're supposed to be helping me.  (In case the subtext of the earlier posts/presentations/roundtables was unclear.)  Yet here I am stuck doing all this work myself. 

I can't say I'm not disappointed. 

Because I am.

That's where I've been the past week: in the archives, reading about these almost-fishes and the many debates they engendered.  This didn't have to happen.  I could've been reading the 3,000 odd posts in my RSS reader.  But you people had to let me down.  Don't think I'll forget this.

Because I won't.

(Unless something more important comes up.  There's only so much trivia a mind can contain ... and petty grudges concerning non-issues are typically the first overboard.)

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*Eddie Izzard is a bad influence.

My First Chapter? Eaten by a Cylon, Thank You Very Much

"Scott's Dissertation" is the name of a folder on my desktop.  Has been for the past three years.  When I migrated my files from my laptop, I copied "Scott's Dissertation" to the external hard drive (a.k.a.); then I copied it from the external hard drive (a.k.a.) to my my new desktop.  I assumed my new "Scott's Dissertation" folder would contain all the files and folders housed in the old one. 

It doesn't. 

The "Chapter One - Introduction" folder is missing. 

It's not on the desktop. 

It's not on the external hard drive (a.k.a.). 

It's not on the laptop. 

I had no choice.  The folder must've disappeared when I was migrating files.  I had to consult the Cylon:

What can I do you for?

Remember that folder on the laptop with my first chapter in it?

Yes.

Any idea where it went?

I ate it.

You ate it?

Did you need it for something?  Hope not because I ate it.

Why would you eat it?

It was there so I ate it.

And this was a good idea?

Probably not.  But it was there so I ate it.  You would eat it too if it was there.

I wouldn't.

You would.  Also: Bird.

Bird?

I look out my window and see the Cylon is correct.  Atop my air conditioner sit two turtledoves.  Their feathers are ruffled and they are looking directly at me.  One cocks its head and charges.  It pecks the window and looks to its left.  The rails of my porch are obscured by a mob of irate turtledoves.

You want to eat bird.

No.

You want to eat bird like I ate chapter.

I don't.

You lie.  Turn in bird instead of chapter.

I need chapters not birds.  I can't turn in a bird.

Why not?

Advisers don't accept birds.  They want chapters.  Search committees don't consider birds.  Jobs are not won on the strength of birds.  I can't turn in a bird.

Too bad.  You go to war with the dissertation you have, not the dissertation you want.

Edith Wharton & Geocentrism & Heliocentrism & Help, Please?

Everyone knows Copernicus killed geocentrism (mostly) during His Revolution, but not everyone knows who killed heliocentrism or when it  even died.  If you happen to know who did, when, with what and where, I think you owe it to the readers of this blog to tell them. 

Were I not too busy parsing Edith Wharton, I would.  But see she writes things which confuse me, like this passage from her autobiography A Backward Glance (1927):

Through [Egerton Winthrop] I first came to know the great French novelists and the French historians and literary critics of the day; but his chief gift was to introduce me to the wonder-world of nineteenth century science. He it was who gave me Wallace's Darwin and Darwinism, and The Origin of Species, and made known to me Huxley, Herbert Spencer, Romanes, Haeckel, Westermarck, and the various popular exponents of the great evolutionary movement. But it is idle to prolong the list, and hopeless to convey to a younger generation the first overwhelming sense of cosmic vastnesses which such "magic casements" let into our little geocentric universe.

As you can see, here Wharton rightly frown on geocentrism.   But then she writes things like this in "The Angel at the Grave" (1901):

In the compressed perspective of Paulina's outlook it stood for a monument of ruined civilizations, and its white portico opened on legendary distances. Its very aspect was impressive to eyes that had first surveyed life from the jig-saw "residence" of a raw-edged Western town. The high-ceilinged rooms, with their paneled walls, their polished mahogany, their portraits of triple-stocked ancestors and of ringleted "females" in crayon, furnished the child with the historic scenery against which a young imagination constructs its vision of the past. To other eyes the cold spotless thinly-furnished interior might have suggested the shuttered mind of a maiden-lady who associates fresh air and sunlight with dust and discoloration; but it is the eye which supplies the coloring-matter, and Paulina's brimmed with the richest hues.

Nevertheless, the House did not immediately dominate her. She had her confused out-reachings toward other centers of sensation, her vague intuition of a heliocentric system; but the attraction of habit, the steady pressure of example, gradually fixed her roving allegiance and she bent her neck to the yoke.

Goes without saying that the heliocentrism that almost saved Paulina from her "compressed perspective" is better than the geocentrism from which "the great evolutionary movement" rescued Wharton and her contemporaries.  The question is, how much better is it?  I don't believe heliocentrism is held in high esteem in 1901, but what I know about the history of astronomy stops short of the Nineteenth Century.  (Such is the perilous life of the autodidact!) 

You can see my general point: Wharton imagines coming into knowledge as analogous to the sneaking suspicion the Earth revolves around the Sun ... only heliocentrism is equally incorrect, inasmuch as it imagines everything in the known universe revolves around the Sun.  Obviously wrong. 

But since my larger argument is that Wharton dramatized scientific conflict in order to avoid creeping obsolescence (boon companion of scientific progress), it matters whether she knew heliocentrism was flawed when she wrote "The Angel at the Grave" in 1900.*

I Imagine Him at His Desk, His Ire Rising with Every Sentence He Composes ...

... until he cracks mad.  From an early American review of The Origin of Species:

Theorizing on empirical grounds is no better than theorizing on rational and a priori principles; but rather it is worse, for it is at once more crude and facile, and more pretentious. 

[...]

Mr. Darwin may be no metaphysician, least of all a Hegelian.  He may even hold all metaphysics in supreme contempt.  And yet his theory is but a crude expression or application of the abstrusest speculations of the modern German scholasticism. 

[...]

With all its show, or rather promise, of induction, it is really a pure a priori assumption, an assumption resting on other assumptions which reach down to the bottomless abyss of Hegelian nihilism.

[...]

[Darwin] can more readily believe that the ox, with his lower as well as rudimentary upper teeth, and man with his rudimentary papillae, his hands, feet, head, brain, his eye in fine frenzy rolling, his discourse of reason looking before and after, his conscience, and all, have come by natural generation from the same hermaphroditic, vegeto-animal, primordial form from which have come the gnat and the elephant, the ichthyosaurus and the megatherium, the mammoth and the maggot, the cabbage and the pumpkin, than to believe that God could have made these species of men and oxen as they are.

[...]

Why do men have the same number of fingers on one hand as on the other, and the same number of toes as fingers, if every thing is determined by use, and nothing by creative laws of beauty, proportion and harmony?  Why is not human hair sometimes green or blue, or the iris of the eye purple or yellow?  Why should men have a beard and women none?  If it is of use to men, why should not natural selection have multiplied the few women who have it?  Why are not men eight or ten feet high, and as strong as elephants; would it not be useful to them?  Why are there no races of winged men or flying squirrels; is it only for want of the happy accident for natural selection to start with?  It would be so convenient!

It would!  It really would!

If I Could Parse This Sentence, The Dissertation Would Be Done

On the eve of the Spanish-American War, Colorado Senator Edward Oliver Wolcott stuffs all my concerns into one gloriously unwieldy sentence:

Who is to say that in the evolution of such a Republic as this the time has not come when the immense development of our internal resources and the marvelous growth of our domestic and foreign commerce and a realization of our virile strength have not stimulated that Anglo-Saxon restlessness which beats with the blood of the race into an activity which will not be quenched until we have finally planted our standard in that far-off archipelago which inevitable destiny has entrusted into our hands?

Evolution and domestic policy and foreign affairs and hyper-masculinity and race-pride and refined blood and imperialism and American exceptionalism all colliding in one impenetrable interrogative!  If I could unpack it succinctly with conviction I'd be long done.

Get Out Your Red Pencils: a Dissertation Abstract Awaits

For those curious as to what literary historicists do (Anthony) and those convinced I do absolutely nothing at all (Emerson), I present my dissertation abstract. 

Behold! 

Everything I've slaved over lo these many years, condensed into five paragraphs ... thereby ensuring that what I've written makes absolutely no sense.  See, I've been over this thing so many times—made so many piddling changes, emphasizing so many stakes here, dropping so many arguments there—I can no longer read the words before me. 

I don't know what they mean.  So invested am I in the history of its revisions—the agonizing decision to delete this, the writhing that accompanied the diminishment of that—I'm unable to judge whether it even makes any sense.  Are the stakes of my argument apparent?  Can you tell how necessary my corrective is to the health of the discipline? 

Does it even make any sense?

(Note: The final version of my dissertation contains a chapter on Twain which is, at the present moment, too excreable to include in the abstract.  Also, my fifty-five page intellectual history of evolutionary theory at the turn of the last century will likely become my first chapter, thus necessitating the writing of an introduction which resembles my abstract and, you know, talks about literature.)

Accelerating Evolution; also, More on the Talkiness of Talks, and the Terrible People Who Read Essays Aloud

I've posted a copy of yesterday's talk—"Accelerating Evolution: Social Reform and the Baldwin Effect in Jack London's The Iron Heel and Before Adam"—for interested parties to read/discuss/mock. 

The usual caveats apply: when I write talks, I write talks; I don't simply read aloud something meant to read alone. 

So you'll find simplification—in particular as regards the physiological basis of the Baldwin effect, as pointed out by Vincent Fitzgerald in the Q & A—and the frequent repetition of characters introduced and concepts established earlier. 

It doesn't sit well on the page.  I know that.  You can't keep as much in your head listening as you can reading.  You can't control the pace of a speaker.  You can't re-read or linger over paragraphs.

More and more, I'm convinced that people who read essays aloud are doing so to satisfy their own intellectual vanity:

"My work is difficult and impressive.  You're going to find it difficult to understand.  That is because I am impressive."

And difficult.  Don't forget difficult.  Because if you're one of these people, you're being difficult for the sake of being difficult.  You think it makes you impressive.  It doesn't. 

It makes you impolite.  It betrays your indolence.  If you want to communicate with your audience, you have to format the points you make in your written work to the media in which you're presenting them.  If you don't want to communicate, you're rude (wasting the audience's time to feel the hum of your ego inflating) and likely lazy (as politeness takes effort). 

More on the conference itself shortly.

A Sign More Revision May Be Necessary

Shortly after five this afternoon, I sat at my desk re-revising Saturday's talk.  I  remember being satisfied with my re-wording of the final sentence of a paragraph, but unsure how to effect a transition to the next. 

I leaned back, considered my options ... and promptly fell asleep. 

Friends, the situation is dire.  My own talk lulls me to sleep.  I'm the most receptive audience alive for my material, yet even I can't resist its soporific spell.  I have no choice but to "jazz it up."  Cue the music [.mp3] and start the show:

... You Edit Nightmare Down, You Edit Nightmare Up, You Edit Nightmare Down, Then You Shake It All About ...

For those who'd like to attend my panel, please consult the official program.  Or show up in Garden Room I of the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Newport Beach at 2:00 PM this Saturday.  Either will work. 

As for what you'll be treated to should you choose to come, well, remember what I wrote yesterday about condensing forty-five pages into fifteen?  Remember the hubris implicit in my declaration that it'd be easy to whittle those fifteen pages down to eight? 

The Gods certainly did, as today I received my comeuppance: over the course of six hours, I managed to edit fifteen pages "down" to sixteen ... but only after casting aside of the rules of evidence, the laws of logic, and the integrity of my argument.  Just as you can only fold a sheet of paper so many times, there's only so much you can nstrip from an argument before it resembles Ann Althouse.  (In seriousness, not literally.)  I'd hit that point around 14 pages.  No matter how many times I took out this bit about Lamarck necessary to understanding Spencer or this bit about Spencer necessary to understanding London, I found myself confronting the same thing:

Utter nonsense.  Without A there could be no B.  Without B, C and D make no sense.  Since C subtends E and D's foundational for F, I could no more remove C or D than A or B and ... then, like an Angel from Heaven, a heavenly angelic email descended upon my inbox informing me that one of the participants will not be able to make my panel, leaving the remaining two panelists an hour and twenty minutes to work with. 

Life is good.  See you Saturday. 

(Or not.)

Dear Person or Persons With Whom I Share Plumbing,

I appreciate you sharing the reek of cheap ganja with anyone who enters my apartment.  Showering to the smell of stale bong water invigorates my soul.  Watching your morning fog on its miasmatic creep from the bathroom into the hall, then from the hall into my office, is the highlight of my day.  You have a kind heart. 

However, I find the material I produce in the wake of your morning ablution decidedly subpar.  This morning I transcribed a passage from Herbert Spencer's Psychology thus: "Every form of Intelligence being, in essence, an adjustmust of inner to outer relations; it results that as, in the advance of this adjustmust, the outer relations increase number, in complexity, in heterogeneity, by degrees that cannot be marked."  Granted, in terms of Lamarckian adaptation, the neologism "adjustmust" has some traction: individuals who "adjustmaybe" are less likely to survive than the "adjustmusters" who crane their necks for the next highest leaf.

But I digress.  (I do that a lot lately.)  I know what you're thinking: "Dude.  Just 'cause you see my smokes in your place don't mean you score a contact high.  Seriously."  Perhaps.  You do know about those scientific studies of scent and cognitive function, right?  The ones saying strong scents like peppermint work as mnemonics, and that you remember what you were thinking when you first smelt those smells?  Because let me tell you:

The crap my brain excavates every time you pump my place full of your noxious weed ain't exactly helping me finish my dissertation.  Quite the opposite.  It would be awesome if you could do your business in some room not connected to any of mine.  If you must—€”if it's bathroom or bust—”maybe not toke so early in the morning or keep it up for quite so long.  You have work to do, and I'm sure the shirts you smoke don't help so much. 

Make an adjustmust.

All will be cool.

A.E. Housman & The Latin for Ass; or, the Kool Moe Dee to Our Busy Bees

Hunting down the source of the Latin maxim with which Wharton closes "The Descent of Man"—"labor est etiam ipsa voluptas" ("toil is itself a pleasure")—I came across numerous articles by A.E. Housman, best known to high-schoolers as the author of "To An Athlete Dying Young."  Regrettably, before tonight I knew little more about Housman now than I did in high school; by which I mean, it could've been summarized "'we chaired you through the market-place' taught me how to verb."  Now that I've become acquainted with him as a classical scholar, however, that's certain to change.  If the below's indicative of his professional correspondence, I can't wait to read his letters.

Perhaps this is well-known to all them what ain't rubes like me, but Housman tore his contemporaries new ones faster and harder and bigger than anyone this side of Stanley Fish.  Strike that.  His is the withering to which Fish-wit aspires.  Consider his introduction to Juvenal:

Frailty of understanding is in itself no proper target for scorn and mockery ... but the unintelligent forfeit their claim to compassion when they begin to indulge in self-complacent airs, and to call themselves sane critics, meaning they are mechanics.  And when, relying on their numbers, they pass from self-complacency to insolence, and reprove their betters for using the brains which God has denied them, they dry up the fount of pity. (xiii.)

W.M. Lindsay's shriveled riposte?

If [Housman's] preface, in spite of the unfortunate¹ style in which it is written ...

¹ I suppose it is useless to express a wish that Mr. Housman would cease to speak about veteran scholars of eminence ... in that fashion.

Fortunately for us, Lindsay's wish was useless.  In the preface to his translation of Manilius' Astronomica, Housman first lights into Elias Stoeber of Strassburg, "a city still famous for its geese":

"Stoeber's mind, though that is no name to call it by, was one which turned as unswervingly to the false, the meaningless, the unmetrical, and the ungrammatical, as the needle to the pole." (xix)

A later translator, Friedrich Jacob, fairs no better:

Not only had Jacob no sense for grammar, no sense for coherency, no sense for sense, but being himself possessed by a passion for the clumsy and the hispid he imputed this disgusting taste to all the authors whom he edited; and Manilius, the one Latin poet who exceeds even Ovid in verbal point and smartness, is accordingly constrained to write the sort of poetry which might have been composed by Nebuchadnezzar when he was driven from men and did eat grass as oxen. (xxi)

As to how Jacob and Stoeber compared:

In [Jacob's] short book, if only its vices are considered, is a scarce less woeful piece of work than Stoeber's: the difference is that while Stoeber never reminds one of a rational animal, the fog of Jacob's intellect is shot through, and not that seldom, by flashes of conspicuous and startling brilliancy. (xxii)

Of the conservative critic, Housman opined:

His trade is one which requires, that it may be practiced in perfection, two qualifications only: ignorance of language and abstinence from thought. (liii)

My admiration aside, I don't covet a return to this sort of scholarly interaction.  However much I may yearn for the passion of the craft, I can't countenance this sort of open insult.  But there are moments—deny it if you will, but you lie only to yourself—when you wish you possessed license and skill to roast your contemporaries as finely as Housman's roasted his.  Who doesn't want to decry a laurel-rester as Housman did, claiming that this book offers readers "perpetual contact with the intellect of an idiot child" (xxiii), or that this scholar's

eyesight was evidently feeble, and did not serve him well in collating MSS or correcting proofs; but that is not enough to account for the bucketfuls of falsehood which he discharged on an ignorant and confiding public. (xxiv)

Much as we hate to admit in polite company, we all share Housman's sentiment sometimes.  We merely lack wit and gumption enough to act on it.*  As for the title of this post: one half's an homage to a legendary rap battle; the other's a reference to Housman's essay on "The Latin for Ass" (1930).  Setting aside the joke others would've cracked at its appearance, you can't help but love the opening paragraph:

In English, down to the 19^th century, the beast which carried Balaam was generally and almost universally, both in speech and in writing, denominated the ass.  It is no longer: the name ass, except in metaphor as a term of contempt or insult, has disappeared from conversation and from most kinds of print, and survives only in serious poetry and in prose of some solemnity.  The name donkey, first printed in 1785 in a dictionary of slang, has usurped its place.