"Jiggery Pokery", Scalia, and the George Will School of Pedantic Rhetoric.

Scalia is a smart and educated guy so one can't just dismiss him as ignorant. However he has the unfortunate flaw common to many bright people - he thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. And he may be. But even the smartest guy in the room can be lacking in wisdom. And Scalia is. It just doesn't occur to him that there are different ways of being smart, that sometimes even the smartest guy in the room can learn from others, maybe even others who don't appear to have the same level of intellect or education. And this causes frustration. Others are "fools" and he does not suffer fools gladly. But instead of being introspective about this and maybe learning something, Scalia falls into what I call the "George Will School of Pedantic Rhetoric." George Will also thinks he is the smartest guy in the room. But he lacks some confidence about it. So to convince himself and others that he really is the smartest guy in the room he is fond of using obscure words which the general audience will not recognize when an everyday word would work just as well. (I have always suspected that Will combs the thesaurus just trying to find juicy and complicated obscure words to use in his columns. But I cannot prove it. Maybe he is just a word nerd). But back to Scalia. Scalia could just as well have said "dishonest argument." That is what jiggery pokery means. By using the more exotic term, it makes him look smart and well educated and his readers not so much because they likely have to look up the term. The ironic thing is that in this case Roberts quite effectively used Scalia's own arguments from a previous case in making the case for upholding Obama's interpretation of the ACA. This really had to piss off Scalia and the result was "jiggery pokery." But Scalia was also calling his own arguments from a previous case "jiggery pokery." So a big fat middle finger salute to you, Mr. Scalia.