The Woolly-Thinker's Guide to Rhetoric

Use 'Obscure' as a First Name

Always refer to people who disagree with you (unless they are so undeniably famous it simply won't work) as 'obscure' while referring to people who agree with you as 'notable' (which sounds so much more dignified than 'famous'). E.g. if you have call to mention the Sokal hoax, be sure to say 'an obscure physicist named Alan Sokal', as if obscurity were not the natural state of nearly all physicists and indeed academics generally.

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