I’d like to direct your attention to two blog posts by Sarah Hoyt. In the first, Sarah takes about being “an odd”, a person who never quite fits in, or at least never quite feels they fit in. On the way she talks about why it might be that men like Karl Marx created ideologies that idealized particular groups while being nasty to individual members of those groups. It’s an interesting hypothesis.

In the second, she talks about the importance of manners, and shares some intriguing memories. Her remembrance of the women who tried to teach her manners is an illustration of what happens when you forget the parenting maxim, “Never attribute to willfulness what can be adequately explained by ignorance.”

What, you’ve never heard that maxim before? Not surprisingly, as I just made it up—it’s a riff on the old line, “Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.” But it’s a maxim I’ve sometimes failed to heed, and as Sarah’s tale shows, that’s a Bad Thing.