{"id":9955,"date":"2019-09-26T08:11:59","date_gmt":"2019-09-26T12:11:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citylore.org\/?p=9955"},"modified":"2022-05-16T22:17:30","modified_gmt":"2022-05-16T22:17:30","slug":"dividing-up-the-world-two-kinds-of-people-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/dividing-up-the-world-two-kinds-of-people-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Dividing Up the World: Two Kinds of People"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Poetry of Everyday Life<\/span>
\nBlogpost #15<\/span><\/h3>\n

Sitting next to me at a bookfair, a poet told me that the kindest thing his father ever said to him was, \u201cthere are two kinds of people in the world, and you\u2019re neither one of them.\u201d I was reminded that my wife, folklorist Amanda Dargan, once collected examples of dividing the world into two kinds of people in notebooks that have sat on our bookshelf for some thirty years. I pulled them out for this month\u2019s <\/em>Poetry of Everyday Life\u00a0blog.\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>
\nAnd well I should because, after all, there may be two kinds of people in the world, but Amanda, City Lore’s Education Director and our guest blogger, to her credit, is definitely neither one.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Dividing Up the World<\/h2>\n

by Amanda Dargan<\/h2>\n

\"\"I grew up on a farm in Darlington County, South Carolina, and one day my father, Lucas Dargan, announced that as a sideline to his work as a forester he planned to start raising chickens and selling the eggs. At the local feed and seed store where he went to buy supplies, he got into a conversation with the owner. \u201cLucas,\u201d the owner told him, \u201cyou know,\u00a0<\/em>there are two kinds of people in this world, those who want to get into the chicken business, and those who want to get out.\u201d\u00a0 <\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Years later, when I was a graduate student in folklore at the University of Pennsylvania, I started keeping a notebook of these everyday expressions that I heard or found in conversations, newspaper articles, and books. My father, always a rich source of these and other expressions, gave me another example. On returning from a trip to Italy, he told us about a harrowing taxi ride in Rome and the driver\u2019s response to his concern about the speed and recklessness of the city\u2019s drivers, \u201cThere are two kinds of people in Rome, the quick and the dead.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 A similar expression is used to describe two kinds of men\u2013\u201c the quick and the wed.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"At the same time I became interested the rhetorical tactics these phrases employ. The \u201ctwo kinds of people\u201d expressions my father reported are \u00a0examples of one of Aristotle\u2019s three laws of thought, the law of the excluded middle. The chicken business expression leaves out precisely the category my father wanted to be \u2013 someone who enjoyed and was successful in the chicken business. It also leaves out people who have never considered getting into the chicken business. The Rome taxi driver\u2019s \u201cquick and the dead\u201d expression leaves out the category of those who drive safely and survive. And then there’s two kinds of divers in the world, those who pee in their wet suits, and those who lie.<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 In addition to the excluded middle, dividing the world expressions often employ the strategy of foregrounding a detail that divides a wide swath of human personalities into two types, often using a mundane behavior to illustrate a larger personality type. Alan Guignard, a friend who was part of a group I travelled with after college, complained that there are two kinds of people in the world, life saver suckers and life saver chewers<\/em>. He was a life saver sucker, and we, his traveling companions, who gobbled through a whole pack of life savers while he still sucked on his first one, were life saver chewers. Life safer suckers, he declared, are more deliberate, frugal, inclined to delay gratification, and stick to a plan. Life saver chewers, on the other hand, are impulsive, seek immediate gratification, live in the moment, and scrap the planned itinerary when they see something they find more interesting.\u00a0<\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u201cThere are two kinds of people,\u201d our friend Holly Cutting Baker declared, describing another character trait that embodies a larger personality type,\u201crumpled and unrumpled.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0 Rumpled people look rumpled no matter how much they iron their clothes. \u201cI\u2019m definitely a rumpled,\u201d she said. \u201cUnrumpled people look neat even if their clothes are rumpled.\u201d Steve Bannon, for instance, would be a rumpled; Barack Obama, unrumpled.<\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Not all dividing the world expressions are binary. Others divide the world into three or more categories based on their approach to a common behavior. John M. Richardson, Jr. once claimed, \u201cWhen it comes to the future, there are three kinds of people: those who let it happen; those who make it happen, and those who wonder what happened.”<\/em><\/strong>
\nSome of these expressions are built around a tautology.\u00a0James Thorpe claimed\u00a0there are those who love to talk, and those who hate to listen,\u00a0<\/em>modifying the more\u00a0common expression those who love to talk and those who love<\/em> to listen, and suggesting that the later category does not exist.<\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Some divisions signify absolutely nothing more than a difference in habitual behavior. My friend Craig Schaffer once told me that there are two kinds of people, those who eat artichoke leaves with their top teeth and those who eat them with their bottom teeth<\/em>. Similarly, another expression divides the world between people who pull their toilet paper from the bottom and people who pull it from the top.<\/em> Those divisions don\u2019t seem to indicate larger personality traits, just habitual behaviors, and they also exclude the middle category of people who aren\u2019t so set in their ways\u00a0and may choose to vary the way they scrape artichoke leaves with their teeth.\u00a0<\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 For philosophers, mathematicians, and logicians, these dividing up the worlds can be expressed in mathematical terms. The law of excluded middle is written by the mathematician Charles Sanders Peirce as {(x<\/em>\u00a0\u2192\u00a0y<\/em>) \u2192\u00a0x<\/em>} \u2192\u00a0x. \u00a0<\/em>I won’t attempt to explain.<\/strong>
\nFor folklorists, dividing-the-world expressions are a form of verbal play. They are a way of simplifying the complexity of human beings, often by drawing on stereotypes, by putting them into distinct categories in order to persuade, express an insight, or argue a point of view with wit and humor. For example, optimists and pessimists are described in a popular expression as those who say the glass as half full, and those who say it is half empty.<\/em>\u00a0My daughter Eliza suggests a different way, which is not included in this binary expression: If you take an empty glass and pour water into it, it\u2019s half full. If you take a full glass and pour water out, it\u2019s half empty. A friend, Carol Klenfner, quoted a man who told his grandchild: \u201cYou ask if the glass is half full or half empty?\u00a0 What does it matter? It\u2019s such a beautiful glass.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 Some dividing-the-world expressions create a false dichotomy to stake a claim or denigrate a category of people. For example, those who love the art or music of, say Beyonc\u00e9, and those who have no taste<\/em>. When Steve told his father that he was planning to teach high school, his father said, \u201cThere are those who do, and those who teach.\u201d<\/em> And one cynic added, \u201cthose who teach teachers,\u201d<\/em> as if those in this category were somehow on a still lower rung of the ladder. At City Lore, in fact, we do teach teachers and consider it a high calling. \u00a0<\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 On reading this the folklorist Phlip Nusbaum reminded me that There Are Two Kinds of People in the World<\/em>\u00a0was also the title of a song by Little Anthony and the <\/strong>Imperials back in the 1950s. (That’s the group that sang the hit\u00a0Tears on my Pillow<\/em>.) \u00a0It goes:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Just two kinds of people in the world<\/strong>
\nwhy can’t we fall in love<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 The tendency to divide the world into opposites has itself become an expression. The American humorist Robert Benchley is credited with the expression,\u00a0\u201cThere are two classes of people in the world: those who constantly divide the people of the world into two classes, and those who do not.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0Hmmm, which am I?\u00a0 Another claims there are two kinds of people, those who live life and those who ponder it.<\/em> If you\u2019ve read this far, you must be one of them.`<\/strong>
\n\u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0 After a few years of considerable frustration, my father did get out of the chicken business, but not before he inspired a way of dividing the world in our nuclear family that has become a favorite Dargan-Zeitlin family expression to use when someone gets too bossy around the house. When my youngest sister Rosa was a child, my father asked her to do a household chore. She resisted and asked, \u201cWhy?\u201d, to which he responded, \u201cBecause I asked you to, and I\u2019m the boss.\u201d \u201cYou\u2019re not the boss of the house,\u201d she told him defiantly. \u201cMomma\u2019s the boss of the house. You\u2019re the boss of the chicken house.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

<\/h3>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Poetry of Everyday Life Blogpost #15 Sitting next to me at a bookfair, a poet told me that the kindest thing his father ever said to him was, \u201cthere are two kinds of people in the world, and you\u2019re neither one of them.\u201d I was reminded that my wife, folklorist Amanda Dargan, once collected […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":788,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"default","ast-site-content-layout":"","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"default","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[97,34,16],"tags":[137,138,139,140,141,31,142,35,143],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9955"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9955"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9955\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15804,"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9955\/revisions\/15804"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/788"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9955"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9955"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citylore.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9955"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}