How you can tell someone doesn’t have a degree in the humanities, or doesn’t understand their degree:
They think anything above “Aliens built the Pyramids” or “All human languages are secretly Turkic” or “The Roman Empire didn’t exist” can be dismissed with an “end of story”. Historians can’t even agree on dates. Lit majors are even worse - and someone who supposedly has a degree in Classical Literature thinks that the interpretation of Sappho as sapphic (dohohoho), a mainstream position since at least the Roman Empire, should know better than to dismiss the position as ‘actually insane’. Not least because it is still the mainstream position and has only become reinforced with recent scholarship.
How you can tell someone doesn’t have a degree in the humanities, or doesn’t understand their degree:
They think anything above “Aliens built the Pyramids” or “All human languages are secretly Turkic” or “The Roman Empire didn’t exist” can be dismissed with an “end of story”. Historians can’t even agree on dates. Lit majors are even worse - and someone who supposedly has a degree in Classical Literature thinks that the interpretation of Sappho as sapphic (dohohoho), a mainstream position since at least the Roman Empire, should know better than to dismiss the position as ‘actually insane’. Not least because it is still the mainstream position and has only become reinforced with recent scholarship.
Someone might be lying on the internet :o
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0LTbwR--9c
Academia, as we all know, is the domain of brevity and easy definitive answers.
It didn’t make sense until I read somewhere that where the sciences sought answers, the humanities asked questions.