Hanging out at the National Review Corner blog, the term "flying monkey" came up for conservatives, and I looked until I found a definition.

Asked, "What is a flying monkey?" Jonah Goldberg responds:

Unfortunately, not everyone reads my column everyday, so a lot of people have missed the explanation. A Flying Monkey is what we call the hyper-educated, culturally fluent, nicely conservative folks who hang around NRO. I admit, a marketing pro would not have come up with such a term for our most loyal readers, but it stuck. I'm sorry. You can even buy a Flying Monkey T-shirt in the NRO store.

In an earlier column, he responds to the same question:

Well, you are a flying monkey. Okay, not the plural you. But you the person for whom I imagine I'm writing this column; you the guy who sends me three paragraphs on what the most Rousseauian line from Silence of the Lambs was; you, the gal who explains to me why my dog shouldn't be opposed to Bulgarian nationalism; you the pop-culture-drenched dilettantes and intellectual jacks-of-all-trades-but-masters-of-none who know how Kirk won the Kobiashi Maru but are also curious about Augustine's City of God.



Flying monkeys are the people who keep me on my toes, much like Robert Reich at a urinal. You are scattered — like the Nockian Remnant or perhaps like so many Junior Mints you're too tired to pick out of the carpet — across the United States and the world. You dwell in veal-pen cubicles and home offices, on military bases and oil derricks. Some of you are not quite conservatives, others are not quite geeks; but you hang out at NRO, if only for the slice of cantaloupe at the end.

The phrase "flying monkey" — originally from the Wizard of Oz of course — has been a term of art for loyal readers of this column and NRO for a long time. Just search for "Flying Monkey" in our search engine if you don't believe me. I didn't come up the phrase; NR's associate publisher, Jack Fowler, did. We use it as a term of affection and I hope you will take it in that spirit. If you don't, I'm sure I'll hear about it.



Works for me. I'd like to think I'm at least working on being a Flying Monkey, although I don't know Rosseau from a hole in the ground.