targhandology

Driff

Page history last edited by A White Bear 2 yrs ago

Driff

From the pre-Uzdumalian era until the latest stages of Targhanidist evangelization, the word "driff" was used as a catch-all to refer to nervous conditions that resulted in the mind wandering from its appointed task of the moment. Nearly all bodily ailments and strong emotional states were known to lead to a certain amount of temporary driff, though a large number of individuals seemed to be cursed with a sort of constant driff, unable to finish tasks without a great amount of fretting, anxiety, and pacing around. Above assigning value to citizens for their logical prowess, rote memorization, and adherence to dogma, the purity from driff in their thought was paid the highest honor, as driff was to blame for distracting them from all three of the lower branches of aptitude.

Driff and the Exams

The Balogh-Isoherranen Exams, for example, measured not only a citizen's knowledge and facility with that knowledge, but, most importantly, his or her level of driff. Even a mediocre performance on the Exams could recommend a student to civil service if the level of driff demonstrated, especially in the essay section, remained low. Knowing this, students who did not expect to excel in the aptitudes were encouraged to practice a style of writing that was extremely linear, executing precise and simple rhetorical maneuvers and working with small, repetitive syntactical units employing an echoing sort of diction, like in the following example:

The Wager of Hortus was in 409. The Wager of Hortus was a wager made by Hortus. Hortus was an Uzdan priest. Hortus was playing Alchemy. Hortus was playing against Drechnel. Drechnel was a statesman. Drechnel and Hortus disagreed. They disagreed for twenty years. They disagreed about the role of the church.

Et cetera. Although this style of response was preferable to the driff-laden meanderings of some of the more ambitious students, this kind of tutoring went out of fashion when evaluators of the examinations began suspecting these students of combating the most violent rages of driff imaginable.

Women and Driff

One of the most recognizable misogynistic tropes of Uzdan culture was that women were far more subject to driff than men were. Because of the hormonal flux of the menstrual cycle, women were thought to be repeatedly battered by waves of driff that made concentrated mental activity insupportably difficult. While this theory had vehement detractors among the Blackfrock Society, who went through periods of denying the higher levels of driff in women and other periods of arguing that higher levels of driff freed their thought from dogmatic Uzdan constraint, it found proponents among more traditional landed women, who formed large Driff Clubs to occupy their time while servants cared for the household. Driff Clubs employed themselves in preparing and consuming refreshments while repeating whatever was just said by another member of the club, in slightly different words.

Driff and Intellectual Life

Nearly every great philosophical and theological writer of the Uzdan empire wrote a treatise on the problem of driff, especially with its relationship to women, and whether it could be controlled through vigorous activity of the mind, such as, for example, writing treatises on driff. From the earliest years of formal schooling, essays on the problems of driff were foundational reading, and the particular contemporary arguments between scholars were followed with great attention by the intelligentsia. After Urgenbah-Fits-Under, a Borrit statesman of the Last Period, wrote a particularly popular and nasty screed against the tendency of females to driff when submitting to sexual depravities, a rising anti-Borritist Frockie leader named Jonner-No-Bread wrote a masterful and much-disseminated response in which she compassionately addressed the problem of Borrie Schools and their cruel perpetuation of the most frightening driff of all, the driff of the soul.

Driff and Targhandism

Although Targhandism would prove to be the final blow against driff rhetoric by embracing the potential value of intellectual driff for the spiritual life, the evangelists first attempted to show how driff was a sign, in women and children, of the most perfectly natural simple silliness in the face of the divine, publishing tracts in which a nonsensical-seeming reading of one of the Sixty-Seven Truths by a woman or child was so full of driff and yet so in line with Targhandistic "understanding."

References:

Balogh-Isoherranen Exams