A name invented by Swift in Gulliver’s Travels for an imaginary race of brutes having the form of men; hence transf. and allusively, a human being of a degraded or bestial type. (Cf. houyhnhnm.) Freq. in mod. use, a person lacking cultivation or sensibility, a philistine; a lout, a hooligan. Another word with a dinstinct meaning well-known to all literate persons excluding computer nerds (who typically view it as a mild interjection -- with none of the weight of meaning given to the term by its inventor Jonathon Swift).

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