Word: veblen
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...Speak English. Born in Wisconsin (1857), of Norwegian farm parents, Veblen was fluent in Norwegian, German, Greek and Latin when he entered college -but knew scarcely any English. Learning it from academic texts, he emerged with a prose which today seems like a humorous man's academic parody of academic writing...
...Veblen approached social criticism as if he were some expert envoy-extraordinary sent from a distant planet to report on human behavior. Under this bland mask of anthropological detachment he hid his passionate conviction that man, in being forced to labor in the sweat of his brow, was not paying a divine penalty for sin but simply giving vent to his most powerful natural passion : "the instinct of workmanship...
...Veblen believed that modern machinery was the latest expression of this natural instinct; he concluded that refusal to use the maximum machinery was not only economically silly but downright unnatural. The machine's chief enemy, he argued, was a moss-backed array of old-fashioned institutions and traditions - and he set out to blow them apart. In his first and most fascinating book, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), he coldly scrutinized the various ways in which the successful businessman struggled to evade his debt to the very machine which had made him rich...
Fetch Me My Handmaiden. Far from being proud of his business connections, said Veblen, the tycoon does his best to convince people that he has never handled a deal in his life. He buys an impractical top hat, to symbolize his state of "conspicuous leisure." He goes off on a jag of "conspicuous consumption"-i.e., he pours his machine-made money into old china and silverware whose chief virtue is that they are handmade and therefore obviously very expensive. To show that he can afford to be "conspicuously wasteful," he turns a stretch of productive pasture into a non-productive...
...Veblen was mocking a process as old as civilization, and it was not necessary to be a radical in order to enjoy his satire. When his book appeared, he was mortified to find that it delighted many of the "leisure class"-the only class, perhaps, which could fully appreciate the conspicuous haughtiness of Veblen's leisurely, elaborate prose. It became Veblen's fate to fall between two stools-between those who thought he was just funny and those who thought he was plain dangerous...