Dan, Dan, that Amazin’ Man, gives me another reason to make fun of him, thanks to the headline he's given to his latest post at the Post, “Why Mike Pompeo is a colossal prig”.
You see where I’m going with this one, right? Mikey, aka our secretary of state, may well be “one who offends or irritates by observance of proprieties (as of speech or manners) in a pointed manner or to an obnoxious degree,” but the particulars in Mr. Drezner’s indictment rather point in another direction, viz, that provided by a word defined by Merriam-Webster as meaning “a spiteful or contemptible man often having some authority”.
Yes, M. Pompeo is a prick, a mean prick, a low prick, a pompous prick, a colossal prick. But he’s dwarfed in all his prickitude by the one he works for.
Afterwords
The Etymology online folks tell us the origins of “prig” are lost in time, but quote an amusing extended definition from H. K. Fowler’s once famous A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, not by Fowler but some “anonymous essay”:
A p[rig] is wise beyond his years in all the things that do not matter. A p. cracks nuts with a steam hammer: that is, calls in the first principles of morality to decide whether he may, or must, do something of as little importance as drinking a glass of beer. On the whole, one may, perhaps, say that all his different characteristics come from the combination, in varying proportions, of three things--the desire to do his duty, the belief that he knows better than other people, & blindness to the difference in value between different things.
Fowler himself was often regarded as the prig of prigs when it came to English usage, a charge that was often though not invariably accurate.
