Hacker News Reader

The original meaning of "barbarian" was akin to "not Roman" or "foreigner" (more precisely, someone not belonging to any of the classic civilizations).

Akin to "villanus" (someone living in a village), it took a derogatory tone later, as someone "uncivilized", but that was not part of its literal meaning.

View on HN

Greek, in fact. Barbarian has it's roots in βάρβαρος, an ancient Greek onomatopoeic for "people who go bar bar bar", or people who don't speak Greek.

Due to phonetic shifts in the programming language community, we now say that barbarians are people who say "var var var".

'has its roots'

OK, foreigner. But foreigner to what?

I think that he styles everyone except working-class geeks as barbarians.

Given the context and epoch of the book, I'd guess "barbarian" refers to non-Western, non-industrial societies.

BTW, there's a Wikipedia article about the book. [1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Theory_of_the_Leisure_Clas...

Yes, pre-industrial.

But as far as I can tell, so far, he doesn't clearly define the term in the book.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com