Poets

Like economists (see earlier rants on their uselessness), poets make stuff up to make their "profession" sound impressively full of fancy words and themselves sound knowledgeable.

As a curmudgeon, I certainly don't go out of my way to run across this stuff, but as a well read curmudgeon, I periodically encounter words whose definition I need to brush up on. And thus, I recently encountered elegiac.

It was vaguely familiar, but what the hey, the Mirriam-Webster app on my iPhone was handy. First surprise was that it is eleJEYEac, apparently, not elEEgiac, as I had always thought. Worse, the definition was of absolutely no help: "consisting of two dactylic hexameter lines the second of which lacks the arsis in the third and sixth feet."

I knew poetry was dumb, I just never appreciated HOW dumb. Who could possibly give a fig enough to even come up with one of the terms used in this definition, let alone stringing so many weird words together FOR A DEFINITION?

Poets. Instant headaches.