David Brooks is a scholar in his mid fifties who writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times.  Brooks is also a frequent guest on television shows.  It is clear that Brooks has a background of being a teacher, a lecturer and a scholar.
A year or 18 months ago, Mr. Brooks was an avid Republican who apologized for the excesses of the Bush administration.  In recent columns and appearances as a guest on TV shows, Mr. Brooks has shown that he no longer waves the flag when George Bush stands to speak.  For that, I compliment him.  This shows a capacity for growth.
However, in his op-ed contributions to The New York Times, David Brooks goes out of his way to use two words that tend to baffle me.  Those words are “dork” and “wonk.”  I gather that a person who is a dork or who is given to “wonkishness” is some sort of an intellectual.  Brooks himself is an intellectual who needs not to use obscure terms to describe other intellectuals.
I make no claim whatsoever to being an intellectual of any sort.  But I am disturbed and displeased when an intellectual such as Brooks uses a term that only he understands and implies that the rest of us don’t comprehend what is going on.  As Brooks has now adopted a more egalitarian view of life as opposed to being a Republican partisan, I have come to like him a good bit more.  But he would do us all, including himself, a favor if he were to forget words such as dork and wonk in his future writings and comments on television.  In the final analysis there really is no adequate substitute for plain English.
There is one more thought in addition to my comments on David Brooks having to do with the word “surreal.”  Commentators, particularly females, use that term to describe an other-worldly feeling.  But the more they dip their head in the surreal cesspool, they will find that I am retreating to another station where people speak plain English.
As we enter the brave new world of 2009, Americans and their new President are presented with challenges of an unparalleled sort.  Those of us who try to speak English plainly may hope that in the new year we will not be confronted with wonk or dork or surreal.  But that is just a hope and I am reasonably certain that before 2009 is done, we will have to deal with wonk and dork and surreal once again.
 
E. E. CARR
January 5, 2009
Essay 358
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Kevin’s commentary: You know, ‘wonk’ might be a pretty ambiguous insult but I think ‘dork’ and ‘surreal’ both certainly have their place in conversations today. Sometimes I don’t know where Pop develops the ire towards certain bits of diction that he feels so passionately about.