Thanks to Katie Couric I learned a useless word today

“As Seth Meyers might say on Weekend Update, Really?!” Couric, who watches the show [Glee] with her daughters, said of the photos. “These very adult photos of young women who perform in a family show just seem so un-‘Glee’-like. The program is already edgy in the right ways, these images don’t really — in my humble opinion — fit the ‘Glee’ gestalt.

Do you even know what gestalt means? Do you even care? I’ve heard the word before, but never bothered to find out what it really meant and until I heard her commentary, I didn’t care either.  So I looked it up.

I was still in the dark after I read the definition:

ge·stalt

1. a configuration, pattern, or organized field having specific properties that cannot be derived from the summation of its component parts; a unified whole.

2. an instance or example of such a unified whole.

I then scrolled down the page to find the origin:

Gestalt 

1922, from Ger. Gestaltqualität  (1890, introduced by Ger. philosopher Christian von Ehrenfels, 1859-1932), from M.H.G. gestalt  “form, configuration, appearance,” abstracted from ungestalt  “deformity,” noun use of adj. ungestalt  “misshapen,” from gestalt,  obsolete pp. of stellen  “to place, arrange.” As a school of psychology, it was founded c.1912.

from Dictionary.com

ah! A school of psychology! A German school of psychology! I’ll come back to this  at a  later date.

The thesaurus gives synonyms like contour, shape, structure, outline and form. You understand those words, right? They sure are more a part of our daily language than is GESTALT.  Why didn’t she use one of those words to say that these particular photos didn’t follow the STRUCTURE or even better, the IMAGE of what this show has produced to the public?

Couric used this high brow word  – GESTALT – in order to make us feel stupid or certainly less smart than the elitist speaker is. This is kind of funny since Couric is the lightest weight in television, next to say – Harry Smith. So maybe she’s using the word to elevate herself among the elitists she is trying so hard to be part of.

I don’t know.

I do know that a year or 2 ago, I would have felt like I WAS stupid for not knowing what she’s talking about. Now I see the game she and other elitists are playing on us.  They want those of us who don’t live on the left or right coast, but in the middle fly-over country, to know that we are nothing more than pumpkins.  As Laura Ingraham said the other day: we drive big trucks, keep big guns and have big families – they don’t like any of that.

In short, they don’t like us.

The sooner we realize that these people are not just condescending to the vast majority of Americans, but they really don’t like us, and we stop watching and listening to them, the sooner they will either come around or go away.

I vote for GO AWAY. But then, I don’t watch network tv, anyway.