Let’s leave the Neanderthals at home

When you spend a lot of time with your housemates, as we did during the worst of Covid, there comes a time when the two of you, or all of you, simply don’t agree.

In which case, a wellplaced word could go a long way. It may go a long way in the wrong direction however, and it may have legs that will follow you for quite an annoying time. Your housemates may not like what you called them. For example, a Luddite. Because Ray and I were having a so-called discussion, and I was accusing him of being narrowminded and backward, and he was accusing me of being a pain in the neck, I called him this old-fashioned word. Which led him to look up the definition and discover the Luddite in the house is really me because it means the kind of person who would rather write in pen and ink than fire up the computer. A Luddite is officially someone who shuns new technology, named after English workers who did just that.

I was using it all wrong. He doesn’t shun technology; he shuns plain common sense.

He followed this remark by calling me a doofus and a goofus, always available for people who are too lazy, I point out, to search for a more appropriate and cutting word. They’re namby-pamby terms like half-wit or yo-yo, someone extraordinarily dumb, to which, in the maturity and acceptance I gained from spending a year glued to him afraid to leave the house, I called him a Neanderthal.

I did this because I read that people of European descent still have 2% Neanderthal DNA inside them, which — as a Luddite — I believe he uses on a regular basis to show he’s smarter than me because he can do something like sharpen a knife. I tell him this is an obsolete hunter-gatherer activity and anyway we should have removed all the knives from the house this year.

Which made him call me a bore, defined as a dull and tiresome person who provides nothing interesting to say.

Blah, blah, blah, babble, babble, babble, is all I can think of in response.

Most of the year though we kept things pretty copesetic. But not always. Or some of the time.