Thursday, May 19, 2011

Yahoo

A Yahoo is a legendary being in the novel Gulliver's Travels (1726) by Jonathan Swift.

Swift describes the Yahoos as vile and savage creatures, filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings far too closely for the liking of protagonist Lemuel Gulliver, who finds the calm and rational society of intelligent horses, the Houyhnhnms, far preferable. The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with "pretty stones" they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term "Yahoo" has become synonymous with "cretin," "dinosaur," and/or "Neanderthal."

at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

talk nineteen to the dozen

  to speak rapidly and without stopping

  • abstemious
    Marked by, or spent in, abstinence ; as, an abstemious life.
  • Nureongi
    Nureongi (누렁이) and Hwangu (황구; 黃狗) are Korean terms meaning "Yellow Dog" used to refer to tannish mongrel or landrace of dog in...
  • n-gram vs. engram
    Engrams are a hypothetical means by which memory traces are stored as biophysical or biochemical changes in the brain (and other neural...