Third category of man (nonfiction)

"Third category of man" infographic.

"Third category of man" is a phrase from the novel Cryptonomicon by Neal Stephenson.

Cryptonomicon

The phrase appears in the chapter titled "Shinola":

Men who believe that they are accomplishing something by speaking speak in a different way from men who believe that speaking is a waste of time. Bobby Shaftoe has learned most of his practical knowledge—how to fix a car, butcher a deer, throw a spiral, talk to a lady, kill a Nip—from the latter type of man. For them, trying to do anything by talking is like trying to pound in a nail with a screwdriver. Sometimes you can even see the desperation spread over such a man's face as he listens to himself speak.

Men of the other type—the ones who use speech as a tool of their work, who are confident and fluent—aren't necessarily more intelligent, or even more educated. It took Shaftoe a long time to figure that out.

Anyway, everything was neat and tidy in Bobby Shaftoe's mind until he met two of the men in Detachment 2702: Enoch Root and Lawrence Pritchard Waterhouse. He can't put his finger on what bugs him about those two. During the weeks they spent together on Qwghlm, he spent a lot of time listening to them yammer at each other, and began to suspect that there might be a third category of man, a kind so rare that Shaftoe never met any of them until now.

[...]

This gives Bobby Shaftoe the opportunity to strike up a few conversations with Enoch Root, partly just for the hell of it and partly so that he can try to figure out this whole business about the third category of men. Progress comes slowly.

"I don't like the word 'addict' because it has terrible connotations," Root says one day, as they are sunning themselves on the afterdeck. "Instead of slapping a label on you, the Germans would describe you as Morphiumsüchtig. The verb suchen means to seek. So that might be translated, loosely, as 'morphine seeky' or even more loosely as 'morphine-seeking.' I prefer 'seeky' because it means that you have an inclination to seek morphine."

"What the fuck are you talking about?" Shaftoe says.

"Well, suppose you have a roof with a hole in it. That means it is a leaky roof. It's leaky all the time—even if it's not raining at the moment. But it's only leaking when it happens to be raining. In the same way, morphine-seeky means that you always have this tendency to look for morphine, even if you are not looking for it at the moment. But I prefer both of them to 'addict,' because they are adjectives modifying Bobby Shaftoe instead of a noun that obliterates Bobby Shaftoe."

"So what's the point?" Shaftoe asks. He asks this because he is expecting Root to give him an order, which is usually what men of the talkative sort end up doing after jabbering on for a while. But no order seems to be forthcoming, because that's not Root's agenda. Root just felt like talking about words. The SAS blokes refer to this kind of activity as wanking.

Shaftoe has had little direct contact with that Waterhouse fellow during their stay on Qwghlm, but he has noticed that men who have just finished talking to Waterhouse tend to walk away shaking their heads—and not in the slow way of a man saying "no," but in the sudden convulsive way of a dog who has a horsefly in his middle ear. Waterhouse never gives direct orders, so men of the first category don’t know what to make of him. But apparently men of the second category fare no better; such men usually talk like they have an agenda in their heads and they are checking off boxes as they go, but Waterhouse’s conversation doesn’t go anywhere in particular. He speaks, not as a way of telling you a bunch of stuff he’s already figured out, but as a way of making up a bunch of new shit as he goes along. And he always seems to be hoping that you’ll join in. Which no one ever does, except for Enoch Root.

• Shinola

Fiction cross-reference

• Crimes against mathematical constants
• Gnomon algorithm
• Gnomon Chronicles

Nonfiction cross-reference

• Cryptonomicon (nonfiction)

External links

• Cyrptonomicon @ Wikipedia