James Snyder

I'm Randy Cohen with Person Place Thing.

Here's a person, people, the Philistines.

Why are they a synonym for uncultured oaf? perhaps because they were adversaries of the Israelites.

The latter prevailed and wrote the Bible.

Writing a Bible generally makes you look good and your foes look terrible.

Or even the annual family newsletter my uncle milk mails out each year.

He's such a liar.

But then, why the Philistines and not one of the Israelites' other foes, Canaanites or Amalekites, Amorites or Jebusites or Moabites? That's a lot of foes.

Rough neighborhood.

Any one of them could have become a euphemism for barbarian doofus like Trimpian.

Maybe it's because Goliath was a Philistine.

That didn't help.

So was Delilah, probably.

Scholars are unsure.

She did live in the valley of Sorek, which is good enough for me.

Our use of Philistines is attributed to Matthew Arnold, who wrote, "'Philistinism, we have not the expression in English.

Perhaps we have not the word because we have so much of the thing.'" And he never even met Donald Trump.

Or my Uncle Milt.

I like to approach my guests obliquely, not talking directly about them, but about a person, a place, and a thing of their choosing.