"It's these automatic thoughts that cling to the brain like parasites that destroy thinking and reason...."

"Liberals, I think, are especially prone to this, for a bunch of reasons...."

Opines Ace, noting my Ann Althouse post "A new 'Dictionary of Received Ideas'" and giving me an idea for a new entry for my new 'Dictionary of Received Ideas.'"

Received ideas. More prevalent amongst those on the other side.

Related: "All the assholes are over on the other side."

A new "Dictionary of Received Ideas."

I've been threatening to write a new "Dictionary of Received Ideas" for years — as clicking on the "Dictionary of Received Ideas" tag will prove — so a reader sent me the link to this new New Yorker piece, by Teju Cole, which is exactly that, beginning with an explanation of the original "Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues," by Gustave Flaubert:

What galls Flaubert most is the inevitability, given an action, of a certain standard reaction. We could learn from his impatience: there are too many standard formulations in our language. They stand in place of thought, but we proclaim them each time—due to laziness, prejudice, or hypocrisy—as though they were fresh insight.

The great thing about pinning down these things is that now, anyone serving up the received idea can be forced to acknowledge that their insight is totally stale. If the book isn't written however, you're forced to say things like: If I were writing a new "Dictionary of Received Ideas," I would put [whatever you just said] next to [name the topic that had come up in conversation]. For example, to draw on a topic discussed earlier today on this blog: Travel. My entry for "Travel" would be: It broadens the mind. 

ADDED: Here is my collection, gathered from old posts. I could generate many more using my tags, but here are the 11 entries I've literally said belong in a new "Dictionary of Received Ideas," arranged alphabetically:

Action: When referring to the government, assert that it shouldn't be taken "unilaterally."
Alito: refer to him as Scalito.
Blackmun: Quote "Poor Joshua!"
Barbie: Imagine how she'd look if her proportions matched those of a real woman.
Contradiction: If accused of contradiction, quote Walt Whitman: "Do I contradict myself?/Very well then I contradict myself/(I am large, I contain multitudes.)" Shorter form: say you "contain multitudes."
David Brooks: Impressed by the crease in Barack Obama's pants.
Federal Jurisdiction: Arcane.
Mark Madoff: Hanged himself with a dog leash.
Opposed: Always add "unequivocally."
Presidential nominating conventions: Be sure to use the phrase "tightly scripted."
Weather: When cold, make wry comment about global warming.

NOTE: The entry for "Action" was written in 2004. It would need to be updated to account for the Obama years: 

Action: When referring to the government, assert that it shouldn't be taken "unilaterally." If desired action can only be taken unilaterally, say that your opponents are "obstructionist."

The "Contradiction" entry should have "see 'Consistency,' and there should be an entry:

Consistency: "The hobgoblin of little minds." Emerson said that.

"[W]hen David Brooks complains that Edward Snowden is an unmediated man, I must note that in the civil society Brooks invokes..."

"... Presidents and other leaders were also mediated; they were not merely checked by Congress, courts, etc., but they were also checked by themselves, and a sense of what was proper that went beyond 'how much can I get away with now?' Obama, too, is unmediated in that sense. That Brooks couldn’t see beyond his sharply-creased pants to notice that when it was apparent to keen observers even before the 2008 election is not to his credit. If the system of civil society has failed, it is in no small part because its guardians — notably including Brooks — have also failed."

So writes Instapundit, linking to my post yesterday, which links to David Brooks's new column "The Solitary Leaker."

The reference to Brooks falling for Obama's pants crease is such a big meme that it can be the entry for "David Brooks" in the new Dictionary of Received Ideas. I tracked down a substantial discussion of it from August 2009 in The New Republic:

In the spring of 2005, New York Times columnist David Brooks arrived at then-Senator Barack Obama’s office for a chat. Brooks... had never met Obama before. But, as they chewed over the finer points of Edmund Burke, it didn’t take long for the two men to click. “I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

That first encounter is still vivid in Brooks’s mind. “I remember distinctly an image of--we were sitting on his couches, and I was looking at his pant leg and his perfectly creased pant,” Brooks says, “and I’m thinking, a) he’s going to be president and b) he’ll be a very good president.” In the fall of 2006, two days after Obama’s The Audacity of Hope hit bookstores, Brooks published a glowing Times column. The headline was “Run, Barack, Run.”

Here's "Run, Barack, Run." Does Brooks deserve to be derided endlessly over the fixation on the pants crease? It is hilarious. It's like Rich Lowry getting "little starbursts" from Sarah Palin's wink. You can't not bring it up. But let's remember, Brooks's vision of perfection, seen in a pant's crease, came after they conversed, in depth, about Edmund Burke. That is, the 2 men were talking, in all likelihood, about the importance of civil society.

Does Obama deserve to be called an unmediated man?

ADDED: Speaking of Brooks and legs and feelings and the summer of 2009, remember this? ("I sat next to a Republican senator once at dinner and he had his hand on my inner thigh the whole time.")

"I feel readers are poised to judge and say – if I am not willing to be mono-grateful, why spawn at all?"

"I am grateful that my body will split in half in late summer, and I will probably live through it, being a resident of the affluent west, but the gratitude is ambivalent. And, as the child grows, I meet other pregnant women and learn that we are not all living in a Barbie Gets Up the Duff Dream Palace of Fecund Ecstasy; some of us are depressed, resentful, afraid. But we are, on the whole, silent, in the shadow of the tyranny of impending motherhood."

From the first paragraph of an essay by Tanya Gold called "I am silenced by the tyranny of impending motherhood," which has the last sentence: "This is the martyrdom of an entire sex and it is foolish and childlike, made by babes."

That's in The Guardian, which I'm reading this morning because it's been scooping on the spying, so I had to puzzle over the British form of expression. Duff Dream Palace? The OED says "duff" — the colloquial adjective — means "Worthless, spurious, false, bad, ‘dud’." Example: "I went down to the pub because the play was so duff." (1965   ‘J. Lymington’ Green Drift i. 8.) Less comprehensible example: "It was said by the erks that he once sold rock on Blackpool sands. This was just ‘duff gen’." (1944   G. Netherwood Desert Squadron 10.)

In the American edition of the new Dictionary of Received Ideas, under "duff," we're told: Be sure to mention that Homer Simpson drinks Duff Beer. And as long as we're composing new entries for The Dictionary of Received Ideas, under "Barbie," let's have: Assert that Barbie's measurements fail to correspond to any real woman's measurements. And under "Motherhood"... what do you think? Gold would say: All women are mono-grateful for their impending motherhood.

Hey, Gold! The mono-gratefulness presumption is the offspring of abortion rights. In the old days — I was there — there was absolutely nothing of the kind. In fact, a standard expression was "She got in trouble."

(Here's the old Dictionary of Received Ideas, one of my favorite books. It works for 19th century France. I'd like a new one, for Americans, as I've said many times.)

"The blog is also now unending: you can scroll down indefinitely if you so wish..."

A nice feature at Andrew Sullivan's newly independent blog. This means that the blog is set to have a  number of posts on the page when you click there, but if you want more, you don't have to click to an "older posts" page (as you do here), it automatically provides new posts as you scroll. This gives a vivid depiction of what a blog really is: a pile of posts one on top of the other. For example, my blog is a stack of 32,381 posts.

Sullivan has also moved his archive, which goes back to January 2001: "I have given a sharp dagger for anyone who wants to make me look foolish – so have at it." I don't think the archive makes him look foolish. I read him all the time back then, when he called himself conservative and tried to define conservatism in new ways. Or is the appearance of foolishness not in what those old opinions were, but in the later deviations? Would you read the sort of person who would go 12 years without contradicting himself?

The Dictionary of Received Ideas — my imagined modern American version of it — has this under "contradiction":

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

That's the reflexive quotation but you can keep scrolling in that poem, Walt Whitman's tall stack of lines:

I concentrate toward them that are nigh, I wait on the door-slab.

Who has done his day's work? who will soonest be through
with his supper?
Who wishes to walk with me?

Will you speak before I am gone? will you prove already too
late?

I wait on the door-slab....