Akademik

(VOHL.voyd)

n.

A white, moderately affluent, suburban professional who is politically liberal. — adj.

Rockwell's Vermont still exists, but recent events have shown another side of the state — a Vermont that can seem so progressive and Volvoid that National Review calls it "the American Sweden."

— Ted Widmer, "Vermont Life," The New York Times, February 15, 2004

I’d like to call readers’ attention to the recent Wall Street Journal column of one Mark Steyn, inventor of the phrase “bike-path leftist.” It’s not easy to invent a good pithy phrase: Weybridge writer Bo Knepp deserves more recognition than he ever got for his invention of the word Volvoid, a neologism which requires no translation or interpretation.

—"The Bike-Path Left," http://www.addisoncountygop.org/

The article about a turbine windmill in Charlotte points out, again, the pathetic state of hypocrisy that is Vermont.

The papers report with regularity the battles that ensue, usually in Volvoid ghettos like Waitsfield, when someone does anything that reflects a little industry, thought, or creativity.

— James R. Hogue, letter to the editor, The Burlington Free Press (Burlington, VT), November 23, 1999

There's a different adjectival sense of this word that means "of or relating to Volvos or Volvo drivers" or, as a noun, "a Volvo driver." This sense dates to about 1988.

As one commenter noted above, I invented the word "Volvoid" and first used it in an article for the Rutland (Vermont) Herald/Times Argus published on Sunday, May 11, 1997. The paper titled the piece "Volvoids Have Defeated Woodchucks"; my original title was "Volvoids, Woodchucks, and Politics in Vermontland."

In Vermont dialect, a woodchuck is a native Vermonter, usually a rustic. At the time of the article's publication, upscale flatlander (out-of-stater) immigrants here commonly drove Volvo station wagons. Perhaps an updated term for these folks would be "Subaroids," as that company's Foresters seem to have taken the place of the Volvo wagons of yore.

I suppose I also invented the term "Vermontland" in the same piece. It refers to the morphing of the state into what former Vermont writer and fellow retrogrouch Martin Harris called "a faux 19th century agricultural theme park," and another fellow, name lost to memory, referred to in a 1991 talk at the Ilsley Library in Middlebury, VT as "a theme park for wealthy strangers."

Now you know.

Bo Knepp

(802)545-2045

bowrite\@gmavt.net