Life & Wisdom Quote by George Woodcock

Woodcock’s line is a small needle aimed at a big balloon: the pomp of institutional honor, especially when it’s imported wholesale from Britain and dressed up as local tradition. “Even” is doing the heavy lifting. It implies disappointment mixed with mock surprise - as if the system might have been merely ceremonial until he notices the telltale linguistic fingerprints. “Phraseology” is the giveaway word: not the ideals, not the service, not the community impact, but the stock vocabulary of prestige - “orders,” “knighthood,” “companions.” The critique lands because it targets the mechanism by which authority makes itself feel natural: repeat the old terms, inherit the old aura.

Woodcock, a Canadian writer and anarchist-leaning intellectual, spent much of his career suspicious of centralized power and the soft coercion of respectability. In mid-century Canada, honors systems and cultural institutions were often torn between autonomy and colonial residue. His point isn’t simply that these titles are British; it’s that they smuggle in a class-coded worldview where virtue is certified from above, sorted into ranks, and made legible through courtly language.

The parenthetical “and this sort of thing” is the dismissive flick at the end, a refusal to dignify the taxonomy. It reads like someone stepping back from the glitter and noticing the scaffolding: the honor doesn’t just reward achievement, it trains people to crave recognition in precisely the empire’s accent.