It turns out I’ve been misusing the word “idiot.” Probably you have too. Turns out it doesn’t actually mean what I’d always thought, or what I’d been told some time it means, or what common usage suggests it means. Let’s take a look.
Idiot
Idiom
Idioma (Spanish, means language)
Idiomatic
Idiosyncrasy
Id (as in Freud’s “part of the mind in which innate instinctive impulses and primary processes are manifest” — Oxford English Dictionary [OED], again, say thank’ya!)
It started for me when I ran into the Spanish word for language, “idioma” which surprised me, given the French word for language is “langue,” as in tongue, which is a way of referring to language in English as well… but Spanish went with idioma instead of some derivative of the Latin for “tongue” (“lingua”). Interesting. So I traced the origin of “idioma” and then the origins of all the seemingly related words I could find.
In doing that (using my printed copy — you know, book? An actual book? — of the OED) turns out that instead of being a state of relative mental incompetence it actually means something more like standing “outside the herd” or “being of idiomatic character, self-defined, different” and so on.
Not quite what I’m talking about, and not quite *not* what I’m talking about… dig?
Try this: thinking about all that now consider the statement one is apt to make when doing something unusual in a public place for the first time; what do you say? “I feel like an idiot.”
Or, you see someone skip dancing down the street, maybe banging his head against street signs “just for fun,” what do you say? “What an idiot!”
Or the scene in Rocky II where Rocky’s coach has him chasing a chicken as an exercise in speed and agility, and Rocky finally quits, saying “I feel like a Kentucky fried idiot.”
I’ve always thought that we all of us meant something like “substandard intelligence” with that word. No, not at all. I was wrong!! (Geez, what an idiot!)
Mostly it’s used as a handy insult, and a grade-school-cheap way of trying to discredit someone. As such, it’s an “insult” that mostly shows instead the speaker to be the one having trouble.
It actually means some one who has been judged and found guilty of “standing outside the herd.” You’re not doing something (what ever it is) in the normal way, the accepted way, whether that’s worse or even better than the “normal way.” It’s an acceptance thing, and calling some one an Idiot (in the common-usage way of saying things) is to judge that person as “not belonging to the herd.” Exile. It’s an insult, if you please.
Let me say it again, for clarity. This includes doing things in less than the accepted way, as well as doing things in a more competent than normal way. So, whether you are fumbling it, or whether you just look like you are fumbling it (by doing it better), you are “not of the herd.”
In Nature (as the expression goes) to be exiled from the Herd is usually a death sentence to that individual. So when we say Idiot at some one, we are being very, very primitive indeed, reaching into our most basic mammalian impulses.
So, that’s what they mean when they call someone “idiot.” But I prefer — now — to see it as a compliment. It means you are doing it yourself, sourcing it yourself, feeling it out on your own, not simply cloning someone else’s behavior or practice.
With all this in mind, I say: We Need More [competent] Idiots! 🙂