Featherless biped

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, "a featherless biped vehemently 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.

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 of featherless biped which 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.

There were, of course, other elements in the medieval Christian system which were adapted to breed in the featherless biped a high sense of his cosmic importance and of the momentousness of his own doings.

Aristotle's characterization of humans as featherless bipeds is an attempt at a demarcation criterion. It happens to be a poor attempt, since apes, tyrannosaurs, and plucked chickens are also featherless bipeds. But even if humans were, in point of fact, the only featherless bipeds, the featherless-biped criterion would at most give us a litmus for distinguishing humans from other species. If what we wanted was an explanation of what makes Plato a human being, the fact that he is a featherless biped is clearly a non-starter.

The day Microsoft went public, [Bill] Gates became 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 richest featherless biped on the planet, with a net worth just shy of $13 billion.