In Charles Dickens's "Hard Times" (1854), the banker Josiah Bounderby is dubbed "the Bully of humility" (the phraseseems to permeate the book but only comes up three times). I had always read this as referring to how Bounderby bullies others with his humble origins, and in a discussion on the term this morning with my first section of a class, we all read it that way. But in the discussion with the second section right afterwards, my student Elliot proposed an interpretation that I understood as Bounderby bullying the humble people of the working class. But Elliot corrected me: they meant thatBounderby was bullying the concept of humility itself. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 30 March 2026)