Doesn't Suffer Fools Gladly; Huh?

Umm...I'm mental. What's your excuse? :roll:

Oddly enlightening, thanks mso489. Ive heard the expression plenty of times, but never really though it out to that extent. Well stated sir.

Ahhh, I thought the thread was called "surfer fools." I'm in the wrong post, sorry. :?

I think it must be a slow day. The first problem is the simple definition of "suffer". In the context of the expression it merely means "abide" or "stand for". It has nothing to do with pain. There is a decided difference in being foolish and being a fool. Doing something foolish does not make one a fool.
As for people like this I would sincerely suspect that the psychoanalysis offered is wrong. Don't know but on occasion I abide the actions of others.

I think the expression is an entirely appropriate one. Unfortunately, MSO, your understanding of the term is what is weak, and it is we who must suffer your lack of knowledge of the meaning of words. The word suffer has nothing to do with pain. In this context it means "tolerate." Thus, it means that while many of us will tolerate a fool, accepting his foolishness with a bit of a smile on occasion, the individual in question is more than likely to say something on the order of: "better to say nothing and be thought a fool than to speak up and prove it." A quick excursion through the dictionary will give you the various meanings of suffer. As a transitive verb it has four meanings, of which the third sense is the type referred to in the expression. Shakespeare uses the line "the eagle suffers little birds to sing." Be assured that the eagle is feeling no pain whatsoever. Rather, hear the word is used in the fourth sentence, which means: to allow especially by reason of indifference. Hope this helps.

It's usually used as an excuse to be rude, but it's hard to put up with someone committed to being stupid.

mso489 observed:

No one suffers fools gladly ...

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Maybe not, but some folks DO suffer them politely ... MrsS, for example, is that way ... I, on the other hand, am, as you so vividly put it, an august old coot who does not ... I've never thought that attitude earned me a "badge of respect" or that it might gain the admiration of others, it's just part of who I am ... in younger years, I used to be more long suffering and polite when exposed to fools, but given the exponential increase in the supply of fools and my ever advancing old cootness, I'm less inclined each day to suffer them gladly ...

ravfesev has the truth of it. In its use as a transitive verb, suffer means "to experience".
"The eagle suffers little birds to sing." - Shakespeare
I've considered this phrase to be descriptive of someone who is all business and who does not welcome having time wasted.

Suffering fools should not be interpreted in the modern sense. To do so skews the meaning and misses the point of the adage.
Kings often suffered fools gladly. In deed, many royal personages kept fools as part of the royal retinue for diversion and amusement. The fool was often a master of satire and could get away with making sport of the royals without suffering any penalty. Part of a fool's job was to keep the king grounded in reality and not believing his press as it were.
The fool was, in many cases, untouchable in the sense that he was thought to be not entirely sane ergo, not responsible for what came out of their mouths and so, somewhat freer to say what many were afraid to say in the presence of the Monarch. Being, or playing the fool was an important position, probably not accompanied with a lot of job security, often times well remunerated. His importance was that he could speak truths which were not popular with a certain degree of impunity.

I use this expression often to describe people that don't enjoy my goofball sense of humor. I am usually very professional, but sometimes my inner clown escapes.

In actuality, it's a twisted version of a quote of the Apostle Paul. "For ye suffer fools gladly, seeing ye yourselves are wise." In modern usage it would be, "You hang around with idiots because they make you look smart". I think he was being sarcastic. The modern version is just mean and lacks any nuance of meaning. Anyone who would believe that of themselves is probably a fool himself, and a conceited one at that.

Let's defend elitism.
I prefer the company of well educated and mannered folks. I am polite to those that are not. However, I don't necessarily enjoy all of the interactions with them. listening to the office workers talk about dancing with the stars and the Kardashians can become tiresome.

Well said, but what is wrong with perfectionism?

Well said, but what is wrong with perfectionism?

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Perfectionism is inefficient. I prefer Satisficing, a term coined by Herbert Simon. The premise behind Satisficing is this: If a company attempts to build the 'perfect product' or attempts to build a product perfectly, they will eventually exhaust their resources, both in terms of capital and man-hours. In attempt recover their expenses during manufacturing, the company will have to sell the product at an exhorbitant price or risk not making a profit. In other words, perfection is the enemy of the good. We should instead try to make a product good enough, not perfect.
Satisficing is designed into all modern manufacturing processes. Even those processes involving manufacture by robots, whom we think of as infalliable and 'perfect' compared to a human employee. Those processes are designed around the premise that perfection is unachievable.
For example, a robotic arm on the Toyota manufacturing line is expectedd to mistakes. The Standard Deviation for missing spot welds is 1 in 20. That's 5 mistakes in 100. (95% is still an 'A' grade, right?)
Toyota knows that the roof of their car needs 375 spot welds. They will program the robot to perform 400 welds, 25 more than necessary. If the robot performs according to statistical behavior and misses 5 welds for every 100, it puts 380 into the roof. That's 5 more welds than necessary.
If Toyota expected the robot to perform perfectly and miss 0 welds, all cars would be built below-specification. They could spend twice as much money buying better robots that only missed 1 weld in 50, but why go to that expense? It is just cheaper to design expected failure into the manufacturing process. On the rare occasion the robot does the job perfectly (making 25 more welds than necessary), did we really lose that much time?
Perfection is impossible, expensive and unnecessary. Good enough will usually do.

Unless the opening post here is referring to something/someone in an earlier post which I have missed (somebody please help me out if this is the case) it seems to have no purpose in a forum that is dedicated to pipe smoking.
This thread now seems to be degenerating into the arrant nonsense which in my opinion populates the eternal 'starcat' thread. However if this is indeed a pointless OP, at least it is well-written, unlike the thought-disordered starcat offering (although that does actually mention the word "pipe")

flaky:
"it seems to have no purpose in a forum that is dedicated to pipe smoking."
If you'll look at the section this thread is in, it's called "General Discussion." And "General Discussion" is not a pipe-related section of the Forum.

Not a worthless post - all good prose (and that it is) is worthwhile - I just couldn't understand its point. I thought you might have been making direct/indirect reference to a previous post which might have included the irritating phrase?
What is true, I believe, is that the resulting thread which did bring up some interesting philosophical slants was beginning to get hijacked.