Wit & Attitude Quote by Phyllis McGinley

Armed with facts and still “merry,” McGinley strolls into debate like someone who still believes in the social contract - and then immediately asks Providence for body armor. The wit is doing double duty: it flatters the reasonable reader while admitting, with a wince, how little reason rules the room. “The fool as adversary” isn’t just wrong; he’s structurally unreachable, sealed inside a private fiefdom where “mind” is “a kingdom” and logic has no jurisdiction. That metaphor lands because it frames irrationality as sovereignty: you can’t argue your way into someone else’s country if they don’t recognize your passport.

The rhyme and meter matter. The jaunty sing-song (“come / merry”) sets up an almost nursery-rhyme cadence, then turns it into a cautionary prayer. That tonal pivot is the trapdoor: you start smiling and end up recognizing the exhaustion of persuasion. The sharper sting is in the final couplet, where McGinley maps a whole epistemic inversion: the fool labels your “conviction” as “prejudice” while laundering his “prejudice” into “opinion.” It’s not ignorance; it’s a rhetorical power move, a way of claiming neutrality while smuggling in certainty.

Contextually, McGinley wrote in a mid-century America that prized “common sense” and polite discourse while simmering with ideological polarization (from the Cold War to domestic culture battles). The poem reads now like a pre-internet diagnosis of bad-faith argument: facts aren’t defeated, they’re reclassified. The prayer isn’t for victory; it’s for surviving the encounter without being dragged into the fool’s kingdom.