The Barnum Principle
"Do take him away and feed him, for he has been in high dudgeon all morning!"Name that film!
I was thinking of this quote in the shower this morning, enjoying the humor of its cinematic context. How delightful a word is dudgeon, thought I, and food is just as good a treatment as any!
And in accordance with the Barnum principle (not "there's a sucker born every minute," but the tendency to ascribe disproportionate significance to generalizations (e.g., horoscopes) or coincidences), there was dudgeon as my Google word-of-the-day!
I saw this first hand last night. I would hesitate to say my loss at Scrabble put me into a high dudgeon, but it did shut me down for several minutes while the victors (both people who care for me and would never intentionally hurt me) looked at me concernedly.
They both knew that I am fiercely competitive; I know it, too. It has been the most difficult of my personality traits direct into proper, constructive channels. The difficulty is that even the most competitive lose. When it happens to me, the only way I have found to deal with it is complete detachment. I execute an emergency shutdown.
Perhaps that is a high dudgeon. If I didn't do it, though, I'm pretty sure I'd be either intolerable or a laughingstock. The behavior to which impulse directs me is childish and laughable, so I pull the emergency handle, all the while hating the fact that I need one. It doesn't work to cover my competitiveness, but it keeps me from saying something that may not very well reflect my saner, calmer self.
I became that self again after finishing the remains of my roommate's piece of birthday cake. Nothing better for a dudgeon than a high-carb fix!
posted by Lynn @ 11:06 AM
3 Comments:
P & P... speaking of which, you must see the newest version of Pride & Prejudice, the one with Kiera Knightley... it is outstanding. Elisabeth has seen all the other ones and says this newest edition is the best.
Heh heh...already been there, brother. I'm not much of a fan. : / Maybe another viewing would make it better. I'm a die-hard fan of the five-hour Colin Firth variety.
You know that I own the new one if you'd like to give it a second and open-minded viewing. (As it turns out, I also own it even if you don't want to.) ; )
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