vulcan

[Jonathan Lighter]

Maybe the definition should be expanded slightly to "an emotionless intellectual or technician."  But that's OED's problem.

  And don't you love the way this "literary scholar" avoids "value-laden" language like "deployment," "hacks," "without taste, ideas or talent of their own," "privileged," and, of course, "vulcans."

  More typical than not in my experience.  But I digress.

  JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: vulcan
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At 5:02 PM -0800 12/15/07, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>"An emotionless intellectual." Not in OED. Presumably a zillion Googlits.
>
> 2007 Wikipedia Discussion
>[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Sentimentality]: I write as a
>literary scholar: This seems to be a very value-laden deployment of
>the word "sentiment"....This definition was obsolete fifty years
>ago. Western fiction has always been primarily affective and about
>exploration of emotions, and the notion that it hasn't was limited
>to a few New Critical hacks with lots of influence but without
>taste, ideas or talent of their own. To the chagrin of these
>privileged vulcans, emotion/sentiment are actuallys [sic] ways of
>knowing, usually more constant an [sic] reliable than linear reason.
>
> A Waki "way of knowing"?
>
> JL
>
I would think that it's often not so much 'intellectual' but rather
something like 'hyperlogical' and/or 'data-driven', since one of Mr.
Spock's most salient and persistent traits (other than being
pro-"logic" and anti-emotion) was coming up with all those precisely
(not to say absurdly) expressed odds and percentages. He wasn't
really particularly intellectual as I recall.

LH

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