Gypsy Scholar: Fraudulent 'Genocidal' Blogger

Scholar and his Books

Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674)

Wikipedia

I received a sharp if misguided reprimand yesterday from a conveniently anonymous critic who came riding up on his high horse and dispensing 'just' judgment against me on a blog post dedicated to my recently deceased Uncle Bill Hodges:

I came to your page trying to find scholarly articles on 'Gypsies', turns out you are just a fraud. For all your education you're surprisingly ignorant.

Thanks for the cultural genocide.

Taken aback, initially, at the accusation that I pose an existential threat to the Romani people, I collected myself and replied:

Nice comment to leave on a blog entry commemorating a good man's death.

As for your intemperate remarks, I suggest that you familiarize yourself with the expression "gypsy scholar," which is a well-known label for a scholar without tenure who moves from university to university in search of jobs. There are a lot of us.

When you're no longer ignorant of the expression and its meaning, you'll not further embarrass yourself in future encounters with gypsy scholars, nor will you continue to make ridiculous accusations of "fraud" and of "cultural genocide."

On the implausible possibility that my anonymous critic is lurking, willing to listen, and open to learning something new, a professional explanation of the expression is hereby provided:

Gypsy scholar: is an informal term given to some academics who either move several times between institutions and/or work at two or more institutions at a time. There are several possible reasons explaining the existence of gypsy scholars, among these are the fact that many teaching jobs are now either part-time or terminal (1-3 years), with tenure-track positions harder to secure, and also a high cost of housing and living. The latter appears to have become a fairly common situation in California, where the price of housing has skyrocketed (as of 2005).

We see, then, that I am the one facing an existential threat! The outraged fellow, for his part, did not respond to my reply to his comment, nor do I expect a reply to this post. No anonymous commentator need ever apologize for rudeness or false accusations -- that's the beauty of anonymity.

This particular anonymous, frustrated commentator, angered -- in his ignorance of a well-known English expression -- at failing to find what he had wrongly expected, finds himself instead aggrieved at my putative, inadvertent 'slight' against his profound misunderstanding of English and rouses himself in righteous anger to a peak fit for a fit of pique, all the wilder for its unmeasured animosity, so exaggerated as to accuse me -- despite my obvious scholarly isolation, my lonely academic wanderings -- of "cultural genocide"!

Thus have I single-handedly disposed of Romani culture, something not even the National Socialists managed to do. In the mind of my anonymous critic with a grievance, I'm obviously not a gypsy scholar, but rather a fascistic activist . . .