What the heck is a Gadfly?

One of the truly great things we've gained from the Internet is nearly instantaneous access to a wealth of information  Seriously, the ability to look up just about any word or phrase we don't fully understand... while we are still reading... is huge!

In the past, when perusing a book or periodical, if we stumbled upon an unfamiliar word we had two choices; try to understand it contextually... or simply gloss over it in hopes that it's meaning isn't crucial to what we're reading.

My daughter is in the habit of reading books with a small notebook at her side.  When she is stumped by a word, she writes it down in her notebook and looks it up later in the dictionary.  However, most of us aren't that diligent, and probably prefer to guess at a likely definition or pretend it's some obscure foreign expression... unimportant to the outcome of the story.

But since the advent of the Web, there are a host of free tools that allow the reader to look up words without even leaving the document where they are found.  Personally, I like to Google unfamiliar words to get a nice selection of definitions.

For example, yesterday morning I was reading an article about the death of a former Palestinian negotiator named Haidar Abdel Shafi from stomach cancer.  The article included the following:

"The charismatic, lanky gadfly to the late Yasser Arafat was most known internationally for leading the Palestinian team with Jordan to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991 and to peace talks in Washington in the two years following." *

The word that popped out at me almost immediately was 'gadfly'.  I'd heard/read the word many times before, but somehow had always had the idea it meant a playboy, socialite or something similar.  But this didn't seem to fit the way it had been used in the article... so I decided to look it up.

Wikipedia delivered a nice working definition complete with historical citations:

"Gadfly is a term for people who upset the status quo by posing upsetting or novel questions, or attempt to stimulate innovation by proving an irritant.  The term "gadfly" was used by Plato to describe Socrates' relationship of uncomfortable goad to the Athenian political scene, which he compared to a slow and dimwitted horse. It was used earlier by the prophet Jeremiah in chapter 46 of his book. The term has been used to describe many politicians and social commentators... It is important to note that in modern politics, gadfly is a demeaning term that is used to refer to folks who constantly complain about the political system just to hear themselves complain."

Huh?... boy did I have that one wrong!  And boy are you guys going to be seeing a lot of that word in future posts! :-)

Chag Sameach to all and thanks again to everyone who has chipped in to help get the Pina Chama back on its feet.  the total is now over $3600!  Great work!!!

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