A Brief History of Cunning
August 15th, 2008 by Steve BowbrickHere’s a lovely Radio 3 programme by American satirist Joe Queenan that does a simple and special thing: it draws our attention to the strangeness and difficulty of our language and of the concepts we use it to describe. I thought I knew what cunning was but I pretty quickly learnt that it’s a fantastically tricky and contingent word, woven into the history of human misconduct in a really subtle way: Italian journalist Beppe Severgnini says in the programme that “cunning is a pathology of intelligence”. Good stuff (MP3).
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