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(08-21-2015, 03:41 PM)Ignacius Wrote: Wit isn't necessarily the tool of the snob. Â Just recall that wit was the province of the literate and the educated, and for the better part of a few thousand years, the only people getting taught to read, in fact taught at all, were the rich and privileged. Â I figured it was sarcastic because it hasn't been that way for a long time. Â With universal education comes the concept that wit is actually the province of the intelligent. Â We just weren't teaching all the intelligent to read or write, so we have no record of the zingers told between the cobbler and the ferryman.
However, these days, wit is perceived as a trait of raw intellect, not education. Â Knowing a statistic that might derail someone's argument is effective, but not necessarily witty. Â Being able to logically deconstruct someone's argument in real time without the statistic certainly is. Â Wit is just a measure of mental reaction time, sort of the time it takes to process a response.
That makes it VERY obvious in conversation, even in RP-lapse, who thinks of a good response in a few minutes, who needs a few hours, and who needs a few days. Â And none of these three people are more effective, more knowledgeable, or even more right. Â Wit, and by extension intelligence, are measures of speed. Â They're not easily faked unless you can insert a good response six posts down the line, and that's only if you can come up with the response while it's relevant.
That's not as easy as you might think it is. Â Hence the line I drawled about time. Â Maybe if I gave people a few days to think up the best response possible, they could mimic it better, but giving people a few extra minutes before typing generally doesn't turn someone who isn't very good at turning phrases into a rhetorical machine. Â It's not as easy as you might think it is. Â Some people really have a hard time with it.
We have no lower-class zingers because people chose not to record them as much as they couldn't be recorded. Their speech was low, and to be corrected, because it lacked the linguistic markers of upper-class wit. They might have referred to vulgarity directly, rather than obliquely; their wordplay might have lacked the appropriate grammatical structures to be worth recording (a serious concern in 19th century Britain in particular, where correct speech is seen as a marker of moral character) or it might have been accidental. What value, then, was there in recording them?
Now this is admittedly much more true for Britain than for the United States, where it's possible to have a "folksy" wit and the lower-classes, or the rural ones anyway, are seen as respectable in their own right. But a lot of our markers for witty speech come both from the educational opportunities for the upper classes and how they policed what speech was considered intelligent. That we perceive wit as a sign of raw intelligence rather than education is a holdover from that period.
Knowing that the notion of wit in the modern day is an accident of history and culture, why are we telling people they can't be witty instead of questioning our own perceptions of wit?
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