Funny thing, the English language. Subtle, nuanced, full of layers and inferences to be made. Someone said to me not long ago that 'relentless' and 'consistent' mean the same thing, but one of them, in my work context, has a negative connotation. So they don't mean the same thing then. But that's then down to a personal and subjective interpretation. They'd probably be in the same section of a thesaurus.
As would those minor non-profane insult words we chuck about. Fool. Prat. Clown. Imbecile, moron, twit. I looked those last three up. In a thesaurus, under 'idiot'. The definition for idiot is given as 'very stupid person', but that isn't right. That's an imbecile, or a moron. And those two are different, surely? As an insult, an imbecile can't help it, but a moron can. Idiots don't have to be stupid.
We've all got idiots in our lives. Maybe I'm the one in yours. In which case, I apologise. Which probably means I'm not an idiot, although I may be the other things. I have idiots in my life, though, just as you do. I think they're more difficult to deal with than twits (silly people), or prats (irritating people), or clowns (can't take them seriously even though they do).
I've decided that this is because you cannot reason with an idiot. They not only believe themselves to be right, they believe you to be wrong.
Take that motorist (invariably in a German saloon car painted some sort of grey) driving up your arse on the motorway. He's definitely an idiot. He's doing something stupid, dangerous, but it's you that's wrong, probably by being on the road. But he's an idiot right then. Somewhere along the line he's acquired that car so it seems reasonable to assume that in a different context he isn't an idiot. Not all the time. He may even be reasonably intelligent.
Idiots make crap decisions too, when they're being idiots. And because they've convinced themselves they're right, they also have to convince themselves you are wrong, otherwise the whole idiot decision making process falls apart. Which means that reason is useless against them. They've already dug in. You can argue until you're blue in the face, you can marshal a series of cogent arguments, you can bring intelligence and the big picture to bear but the idiot has already decided. It doesn't matter what they've decided, because the most important thing they've decided is that you are wrong.
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I once knew an idiot who inherited a lot of money. He bought one of those German cars and became a motorist. It was only when he started driving it that he came to realise there were lots of other idiots around. He was a very happy idiot then. Sadly he came to a sticky end when tailgating another idiot in thick fog.
Drivers change with the turn of the ignition key. Karl Pilkington is called an idiot, I just remembered, and I think that's the right word. I like the fine distinctions.
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