Thursday, June 05, 2008

Words that make me cringe, part 16

Calvinist
John Calvin and his followers get blamed wrongfully for a lot of stuff. All too often, the word Calvinist is wrongly applied, and nowhere done more oddly than in Mark Dapin's amusing article on his 15 minutes and 31 seconds interview with Gordon Ramsay. This interview, which took four months to arrange, and for which Dapin flew to London and then waited over an hour for, before Ramsay was ready to be interviewed, was abruptly concluded by the interviewee, who Dapin says then kicked me out of his house.

Strangely, he blames Ramsay's foul mouth and temper on the uncontrolled expression of a Calvinist personality disorder. How is being of a Calvinist persuasion an indicator of one's bad temper and crude language?

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