I'm proud to be an Auld Crabbit. I was actually invited to join.

I never heard the term til I came here. But I knew instinctively what it represented--a staunchness, an impatience with willful ignorance...a rejection of group think...a steadiness, willingness to stand for something.

I write...and speak...formally. And, as near as my limited education will allow, literately. I write in a fashion that relies heavily on reason, logic and objectivity. It is an older style of writing/communicating, a style that might be more at home in the 19th century than the 21st.

Many here do not understand or admire that way of speaking. I suspect it has to do with short attention spans or an incapacity to deal with more than one concept at a time. It sends people to their dictionaries...or not. (Don't blame the messenger, blame the education system.)

But many of those same people also do not have the ability to "live and let live." They talk a lot about tolerance but only have tolerance for their own point of views.

Chances are fair to good that this post will be reported to the mods. Not because I insulted someone or because I broke any rules but because someone didn't like my "tone." My tone, for all love.

We all recognize that tone can't be conveyed over the Internet but some people spend their whole lives seeing insult where none is meant or given. And jumping at shadows.

I don't think that being an Auld Crabbit has anything to do with being miserable. Quite the opposite, in fact. It is about respecting yourself enough to say clearly "I am not going to get swept away by foolishness or fads or impulse or popular opinion."

One has to have a solid sense of self and of respect for one's self to be an Auld Crabbit. One has to be confidant...I mean really confident, not just stick your thumb in the eye of authority "confident". And and one has to be comfortable within one's own skin.

I like this and think it's apropos:

"There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.'" - Isaac Asimov, column in Newsweek (21 January 1980) [emphasis mine]