{"id":11106,"date":"2008-04-15T16:39:08","date_gmt":"2008-04-15T20:39:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/15\/11106.html"},"modified":"2018-03-13T18:48:15","modified_gmt":"2018-03-13T23:48:15","slug":"one-up-one-down-then-one-to-th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/2008\/04\/15\/one-up-one-down-then-one-to-th\/","title":{"rendered":"One up, one down, then one to the ri-i-i-i-ight"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Your Humble Blogger recently read Potter on Supermanship<\/a>, and the idea expressed in the work at Yeovil of being one-up<\/i> or one-down<\/I> has stuck with me. It’s amazing how big a role one-up-ness<\/i> plays in our lives.
\n

Some of it is spending a fair amount of time with young children, five to seven years old or so, for whom one-up-ness<\/i> is hugely important. If a five-year-old can catch out an adult saying lunch<\/i> when what is meant is breakfast<\/i>, well, that’s a five-year-old that is one-up on an adult, and how often does that happen?
\n

Actually, it happens all the time, at least to me. Sometimes it is deliberate. My primary method for entertaining such children is making easily catchable mistakes, such as substituting the word moose<\/I> for whatever nouns in a sentence can be inferred. Such hilarity! Ah, well.
\n

Children, of course, are so rarely one-up on adults that I find it easy to forgive them their glee in such one-up-ness as they can temporarily grasp. Well, and children are naturally one-up in games and sports, in that an adult’s victory over a child makes the adult one-down<\/i> among his adult peers. But in life, in choices of dinner entrees and schools and entertainment, of bedtime and clothing and hairstyle, in leisure activities and chores and family time, children are so utterly and thoroughly one-down that the temporary (and often fictional) one-down-ness of adults is understandably savored.
\n

It’s less appealing in adults.
\n

No, no, let’s be clear: there is a difference between winning<\/i> and being one-up<\/i>. Just as an adult who scores off a six-year old goalie is one-down<\/i>, so is the winner or loser of a contest often irrelevant to one-up-ness. Winning<\/I> can be appealing in an adult, as can exulting in victory. Gloating, not so much.
\n

But just as the work at the Institute moved from Gamesmanship to Lifeitselfmanship, one-up-ness and one-down-ness infiltrates much more of our lives than games. In fact, I find it much easier to forgive a friend who gloats over victory at Fluxx or Word-O-Rama than to forgive one who gloats at a victory in grammar or argument. Nor is it entirely, or even mostly a matter of simple victories of that kind. No, most one-up-ness (as the work of the Institute makes clear) is a matter of off-hand remark, in-joke, snark, primness or vulgarity, self-righteousness or self-pity, put-downs and put-offs and put-asides.
\n

If it helps, here are some thoughts on the topic: It’s OK to be wrong. When somebody corrects you, you win, because you have improved your knowledge and the other person has not. It’s OK for other people to be wrong, even on the internet. If somebody assumes you know something that you don’t know, they<\/I> made the mistake. But don’t let them feel one-down, because that’s not nice.
\n

It’s OK to be on the outside. It’s OK to like popular music; it’s OK if other people don’t like the unpopular music that you like. Same with movies. And books. And art. And people. Other people’s ignorance of your favorite people, art, books, movies and music is neither a criticism of your taste nor a character flaw. They can continue in their ignorance without being one-down, or they can gain exposure without anyone else going one-up.
\n

Everybody—everybody—is born one-up. If anybody’s one-up-ness makes you one-down, then keep in mind that there are more of them than there are of you.
\n

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus<\/I>,
-Vardibidian.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Which Your Humble Blogger tries to provoke Gentle Readers into watching themselves and others for signs of one-up-nessositificationage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11106"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11106\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18329,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11106\/revisions\/18329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}