Those who take budget airline flights.
Seventy five per cent of budget airline flights are taken by social classes A, B and C, while people in classes D and E occupy just 6% of all available seats. Evidence that all this flying by relatively wealthy people broadens the mind is thin on the ground. Most of them are either rootless cosmopolitans winging their way from meeting to meeting round the world or vacationers looking for a sunnier home from home for a couple of weeks.
Do Professors no longer need to have an ear for language? "Rootless cosmopolitans"?
Jeebus.
Sounds like sour grapes to me, quite aside from the obvious question – What’s wrong with being cosmopolitan?
I am a cosmopolitan and proud of it.
The author of the piece hopefully just has a tin ear for words and does not realise the potential nasty undertone. I hope so anyway.
I suspect that he heard, or read, someone else using the phrase and was too ignorant to understand the allusion or too dim to understand that an allusion was being made. But we’re all ignorant part of the time, and dim sometimes too. Fie, Worstall, what’s happened to your Christmas spirit?
Being heptalingual (?), Jewish, with two nationalities (and eligibility for three others), I am a rootless cosmopolitan. I have often used the phrase in an ironic fashion…