dippy hugberts, the school environment, the nature of dippiness, and why is it so nauseating?

[cimorene]

(At lunch yesterday we discussed the subject of my continuing pursuit of a certificate as a special education classroom assistant.)

Well, the thing about working in the school environment is, the pay is so bad and the conditions sufficiently stressful that nobody would do it if they didn't really want to do it, and like children and stuff. Which is maybe why they're all such dipsticks dippy hugberts¹ except me -

(Brother Metal: The kids?)

- no, my classmates²!

It's the kind of place where they'll surprise you by passing around a badly xeroxed copy of a rhyming poem about what special little flowers children are.

(Around the table: :O, :O, D:, DX)

...Which brings me to how I've been contemplating the total stomach-turning dippiness lurking everywhere in this particular line of vocational training, and also the nature of dippiness itself. Why, exactly, is it so stomach-turning? What is it about dippy hugbertism that is so inherently offputting to me? The reaction is instant and visceral, and I have trouble articulating it to myself. So far I have come to:

Dippiness is:

• trite, clichéd


• sort of twee


• sentimentality, not sentiment


• like a Hallmark store


• like Precious Moments (shudder)


• expressed within a strictly prescribed language of earnestness/sincerity which by its very prefabricated nature is lacking in earnestness/sincerity


• embarrassing to witness, in that it is inherently lacking in self-awareness

Is this a cultural thing?

I know that I certainly was raised by my parents to be anti-dippy, but on the other hand, I was surrounded by other people of similar regional, ethnic, and socio-economic class backgrounds with the opposite viewpoint as well as quite a few with the same viewpoint (Unitarian Universalism is, or at least in my childhood congregation was, an intense battleground between the pro- and anti-dippy forces, and one where everyone's views on the matter tended to come out). That doesn't mean it's not cultural at all, of course, but certainly the cultures in question are then much more narrow and specific than the ones usually alluded to by phrases like "cultural difference" and "culture barrier".

Is it perhaps a question of introversion/extroversion?

Is it related to that old fandom meta distinction between "Warm Fuzzy" and "Cold Prickly"?


1. I think most of us know what is referred to by "dippy". A dippy person is typically referred to as a "dipstick" in my language/dialect group, but occasionally as a "dipshit" such that I formed the impression that "dipstick" was merely a euphemism for "dipshit". waxjism, however, pointed out the common usage of "dipshit" as a close-to-all-purpose-epithet for someone who acts like an asshole, gets in the way or is generally annoying/useless, so it's obviously not a useful term. "Dippy hugbert" was my own coinage to make my meaning clear to her, but I enjoy the fact that it incorporates the dreaded hug-happiness of the Madeleine-Basset-esque dippy movement.

2. Or at least they appear to be, but the second-to-last property of dippiness means that non-hugberts are systematically shamed into keeping their mouths shut about it in environments where dippy hugberts manage to seize the floor, in the name of preventing "cynicism", aka reason or a distaste for bad rhyming poetry or interpretive dance, from supposedly "ruining [the unspecified] It for everybody". From my UU experience, I guess at least 1 or 2 out of every group our size are non-hugberts silently fuming about the whole mess.

Comments

[torachan]

Ahaha, I love the term dippy hugbert. I wouldn't have known what you meant by dipstick (I would have thought = dipshit = asshole), but dippy hugbert immediately conjures up an image.

[cimorene]

I think it was my mom's fault that my dad used "dipstick", so it could well be a regional term, or even a regional term that isn't even used where she grew up (Iowa, Kansas) anymore. I'm not even sure what term would be used where I grew up because people were generally too polite to actually call people whatever-it-was, although the term "dippy" did get some use...

[copracat]

Is it related to that old fandom meta distinction between "Warm Fuzzy" and "Cold Prickly"?

I imagine you're more likely to find Warm Fuzzy readers among dippy hugberts than Cold Prickly readers, but you never know.

I always thought dipstick and dipshit were the non-swearing and partially non-swearing versions of dickhead. I'd not equate dippiness (fluffy-headed, flighty, woolly-headed, daffy, giggly, prone to owning a lot of things with baby animal images decorating them*) with dipstick or dipshit, which I equate with being stupid and mean. But then, perhaps the terms are not from my culture so I've understood them incorrectly.

*Everyone is allowed at least one, possibly two things decorated with baby animal images. Puppies!

[cimorene]

Yes, those are definitely two discrete meanings which may or may not even have evolved divergently (the two meanings could be due to misunderstanding, like many hugely popular misheard versions of common aphorisms such as... ugh, hard to come up with examples suddenly... "as god as my witness"). Even though I'm familiar with both, I had apparently classified them mentally quite far apart - like homonyms or something - and didn't even remember the other meaning until Wax pointed it out.

I wasn't, however, talking about dippiness as congruent with air-headed, giggly, or flighty. That meaning and the 'prone to trite sentimentality' meaning are obviously related/overlapping, but I was trying to pin it closer to intent and further from personality/state of attention with the addition of 'hugbert' (many of the dippiest hugberts in my classes are competent and together, and not the least flighty or giggly, while still being way over-fond of the ideological sort of dippiness involving rhyming poems and how children are just like little flowers).

[mecurtin]

My parents (whose language formed in the 30s and 40s) would say, of the Madeline Basset types, "she's a dip". I never though of it as related to "dipstick" in any way -- an expression they didn't use, btw. "Dipstick" I assumed was a euphemism for "dick". I never learned where "dippy" came from, hm.

[some googling later] It appears that "dippy" as slang for "foolish" started in the early 1900s -- the cartoon character Goofy, for instance, was first named "Dippy Dawg" in 1921. Then in the 60s people started saying "hippie-dippy", which was basically what Madeline Basset had turned into, after all.

And yes, I am sure that you are surrounded by Bassets, it's part of the job. My experience as a mother is that some small children love and need Bassets for their first teachers, while some (e.g. mine) are reassurred by a much more structured approach and firm personality.

[cimorene]

Yes, I vividly remember hating that type of adult as a child, with a very few exceptions who were so genuinely nice that I forgave them for it. I tended to develop a passionate antipathy for any adult who talked down to me, and hugberts are frequently guilty of that. I'm not sure I'd say I enjoyed a structured approach, though - I liked adults like my dad, who treated children matter-of-factly as more-or-less equals and would cheerfully get down on the floor and play with us.

I don't think my mother is the only source I've heard using "dipstick/shit" for dippy people, but I can't say how widespread it is, either, since slang tends to spread face to face. Even if it's quite widespread it's easy to see how the false cognate could be reached independently by different unrelated people.

[l_elfie]

just from what you've described--dippy hugbert is a very vivid phrase, haha--i find that sort of idealogy off-putting because it doesn't seem to be effective in dealing with real children, but rather with upholding the standards of what we adults who don't remember childhood want real children to be like. flowers, for example, or precious moments figurines.

as far as terminology, for some reason there is a definite progression: dippy to dipstick to dipshit, but they are not synonymous in my head. my parents called people dippy, i think?

[cimorene]

I'm not sure the philosophy is really related to strategies for dealing with children as concretely as you assume. Remember that all the adults in question here work with children on a day-to-day basis in classrooms and most of them are parents of multiples. I don't say their perceptions of childhood are accurate, but that doesn't mean they aren't good at controlling children and/or well-liked by them.

But I do think the unrealistic idealization of not just children, but many other things (for dippy hugberts in general, not all of whom work in pedagogy) is an underlying issue. Everyone who works in underpaid capacity with small children likes them, though, it's just a question of whether you feel it's meaningful to describe things that you find amazing (and I do find children pretty amazing) as delicate little flowers or not. (I don't really find flower metaphors meaningful for anything except, perhaps, like, other forms of natural fractals.)

[stranger]

In a possibly-tangential fannish reference, my mind is stepping from children as special flowers to MarySues as special snowflakes. Possibly there's a whiff, in school-related dippy-hugbertdom, of over-valorizing ideal children, in whom the dippies feel they see their idealized childhoods again (or perhaps the childhoods they wish they'd had). This seems more collective than individual, but the aura of believing a little too sincerely in something too good (or cliched) to be true seems similar.

[cimorene]

Hmmm, interesting. There is a feeling of nostalgia about it sometimes, I think.