I am told that an attempt at rabble-rousing by one of the dealers involves a comment concerning the demise of Yahoo which hosts the ancient artifacts forum:
This change will very likely be well received in Warsaw, where members of this
group were recently described as "antiquities pirates."
Indeed, and also for the most part too illiterate to know the significance of when I refer to them as 'Yahoos'. It was another Swift who coined the term in 1726 in his novel Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Swift describes them as being filthy and with unpleasant habits, resembling human beings [...]. The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with "pretty stones" they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term "yahoo" has come to mean "a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person".
Perhaps dealers and collectors prefer that to the term 'pirates'?
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