Ichabod Crane, America's First Fictional Nerd

[Ichabod Crane] was a native of Connecticut; a State which supplies the Union with pioneers for the mind as well as for the forest, and sends forth yearly its legions of frontier woodsmen and country schoolmasters. The cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snipe nose, so that it looked like a weather-cock, perched upon his spindle neck, to tell which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering about him one might have mistaken him for the genius of famine descending upon the earth, or some scarecrow eloped from a cornfield.

[...Later, after Cranes' disappearance, the handling of his estate:]

As to the books and furniture of the school-house, they belonged to the community, excepting Cotton Mather’s History of Witchcraft, a New England Almanac, and a book of dreams and fortune-telling; in which last was a sheet of foolscap much scribbled and blotted in several fruitless attempts to make a copy of verses in honor of the heiress of Van Tassel. These magic books and the poetic scrawls were forthwith consigned to the flames by Hans Van Ripper; who from that time forward determined to send his children no more to school; observing, that he never knew any good come of this same reading and writing.

Notes:

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow's main character's biggest flaw is that he is a nerd, and after her vanishes, the people move the school and burn some of his books.

Folksonomies: anti-intellectualism

Keywords:
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Concepts:
Ichabod Crane (0.973708): dbpedia | freebase | yago
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (0.956102): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Johnny Depp (0.709477): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc | yago | musicBrainz
Ichabod (0.663299): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Headless Horseman (0.649781): dbpedia | freebase | yago
The Heiress (0.587331): dbpedia | freebase | yago
Paper (0.564204): dbpedia | freebase | opencyc

 The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Library Edition)
Books, Brochures, and Chapters>Book:  Irving , Washington (2010-10-01), The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (Library Edition), Blackstone Audio, Inc., Retrieved on 2011-03-28
 


Schemas

28 MAR 2011

 American Anti-Intellectualism

Examples of prejudice against nerds in America.
 5