Language: en
Meaning: (idiomatic,chieflyhumorous)Ahuman being.Synonym:(chiefly humorous)naked ape1863June 27, [Charles Reade], “Very Hard Cash. Chapter XVI.”, inCharles Dickens, editor,All the Year Round. A Weekly Journal.[…], volume IX, number218, London:[…]Chapman and Hall,[…],→OCLC,page413, column 1:The schoolmen—or rather certain of the schoolmen—for nothing is much shallower than to speak of all those disputants as one school—defined woman, "afeatherless bipedvehemently addicted to jealousy." Whether she is more featherless than the male, can be decided at the trifling expense of time, money, and reason: you have but to go to court. But as for envy and jealousy, I think it is pure, unobservant, antique Cant which has fixed them on the female character distinctively.1889July,Charles Kendall Adams, “Discipline in American Colleges”, inLloyd Bryce, editor,The North American Review, volume CXLIX, number CCCXCII, New York, N.Y.:[s.n.],→ISSN,→OCLC,page15:A boy should be directed and restrained; while to a man should be given the range of a large discretion. But the college student is often neither a boy nor a man.[…]Reference is here made, of course, to that species offeatherless bipedwhich at times, especially when taken alone, seems to show many of the characteristics of rational intelligence, but which, when merged into a crowd of its fellows, is apt, on the least provocation, to part with its power of thought and lapse into all manner of irrational ways.1933(date delivered),Arthur O[ncken] Lovejoy, “The Principle of Plenitude and the New Cosmography”, inThe Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea[…], Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, published1948,→OCLC,page102:There were, of course, other elements in the medieval Christian system whichwereadapted to breed in thefeatherless bipeda high sense of his cosmic importance and of the momentousness of his own doings.1996, Steven W. Horst, “Causal and Stipulative Definitions of Semantic Terms”, inSymbols, Computation, and Intentionality: A Critique of the Computational Theory of Mind, Berkeley; Los Angeles, Calif.; London:University of California Press,→ISBN, part III (The Critique of CTM), section 8.4.2.1 (Explanation and Demarcation),page232:Aristotle's characterization of humans asfeatherless bipedsis an attempt at a demarcation criterion. It happens to be a poor attempt, since apes, tyrannosaurs, and plucked chickens are alsofeatherless bipeds. But even if humans were, in point of fact, theonlyfeatherless bipeds, thefeatherless-bipedcriterion would at most give us a litmus for distinguishing humans from other species. If what we wanted was an explanation ofwhat makesPlatoa human being, the fact that he is afeatherless bipedis clearly a non-starter.2008June 16,Dan Tynan, “Bill Gates: 10 Memorable Moments”, inABC News[1], archived fromthe originalon15 February 2011:The day Microsoft went public,[Bill] Gatesbecame an instant megamillionaire (actually a $234-millionaire, based on the IPO price). But it wasn't until July 17, 1995, that Forbes magazine named him the richestfeatherless bipedon the planet, with a net worth just shy of $13 billion.
Validation Count: 0
Sourced from Wiktionary