ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -The Yahoos are primitive creatures obsessed with “pretty stones” that they find by digging in mud, thus representing the distasteful materialism and ignorant elitism Swift encountered in Britain. Hence the term “yahoo” has come to mean “a crude, brutish or obscenely coarse person".

Detailed explanation-2: -The crude, dirty “brutes” of the land of the Houyhnhnms in Gulliver’s Travels, by Jonathan Swift. The Yahoos are irrational people and represent the worst side of humanity. By contrast, the wise and gentle Houyhnhnms, their masters, are rational horses and represent humanity at its best.

Detailed explanation-3: -Houyhnhnm, any member of a fictional race of intelligent, rational horses described by Anglo-Irish author Jonathan Swift in the satirical novel Gulliver’s Travels (1726). The Houyhnhnms are contrasted with the monstrous Yahoos, members of a brutish humanoid race that the Houyhnhnms have tamed into submission.

Detailed explanation-4: -Gulliver in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travel is a Yahoo, not a Houyhnhnm. He does, however, reflect a compromise between absolute animalism (Yahoos) and pure reason (Houyhnhnms). He possesses traits from both the Yahoos and the Houyhnhnms. He is a normal man, but when it comes to logic, he becomes insane.