the stupidest form of condescension

I haven’t encountered this for at least 10 years, but it always used to be annoying. Someone tells you they’re from some city/neighborhood/state/institution. You ask them if they happen to know Person X by any chance. They put on a rich, condescending smirk and tell you something like: “There are 80,000 people there, you know.” As though it were stupid of you to assume automatically that they come from a tiny village where everyone knows everyone else. And that smirk always seems to stay there for the remainder of the conversation.

Here’s why it’s a stupid form of indignation:

1. Incredible coincidences happen all the time.

2. If you’re asking them if they know Person X, it’s probably not just because they’re from the same place, but because you sense some sort of demographic kinship between the two that might lead them to know each other.

3. I’m not asking because I actually think that University X has a small number of people. No population mis-estimate is involved.

For some reason I was just remembering the most ridiculous such incident I’ve encountered. I was working somewhere in the western United States. A new guy started on the job and said he was from University X. He was roughly my age, as was someone else I knew from the same University X who is the absolute embodiment of networking and connectivity. Both were philosophy students. What are the chances that they wouldn’t know each other? It was a perfectly reasonable question.

Instead, I immediately got that old pompous smirk, was cut off before I could even the mention the name I had in mind, and received a scathing lecture about what a whopping number of students there are at University X.

I let him have that one, but then mentioned the name, and– bingo, they knew each other very well. And I knew they would. No surprise whatsoever.

But what was especially annoying was that at the point, this guy neither apologized nor even changed the subject. Instead, he kept trying to relive his fleeting moment of condescending superiority by saying over and over again: “I thought that was the stupidest question, because there are 80,000 students at University X,” and other variants on the same statement that I had already heard from him at the very beginning of this interchange.

Yes, you did think it was the stupidest question. Only, it wasn’t.