Rankism is a degrading assertion of rank. It's what's happening when a person, a group, or nation acts as if it outranks another and attempts to demean, humiliate, or exploit it.

Kilpatrick expresses some alarm at the fact that the Buckleyesque vocabulary shows signs of being contagious, citing the celebrification of the Columbia Journalism Review, and, worse yet, a piece on Patty Hearst composed by George Will (a columnist and conservative in his own right) to the effect that "Patty's arrest provided a coda to a decade of political infantilism, the exegesis of which could be comprehended as a manifestation of bourgeois Weltanschauung.

Needless to say, “midden,” if we are to translate, is the stuff through which one is trying to walk in that footless stocking while the editors of National Review are failing to bite the bullet and forsake all squalid pegomancy for pedomancy.

But it’s aglow with unforgettable characters like the bawdy boy who shares the young Prosper’s hospital ward and Prosper’s sad, germophobic mother.