Stupidity
This category is perhaps the richest source of terms of personal insult and abuse, both historically and geographically through its incorporation of numerous terms from the global varieties of English. The field indeed is so vast and unmanageable that this entry can be only a brief discussion of the salient points. The first of these is that a lack of intelligence is invariably and unfairly regarded as a lack of worth, thus adding a sense of contempt. However, the long history of terms like fool and the category of the “holy fool” show that people with unconventional intelligence were valued in the past. Furthermore, court fools have a long history as figures of special status in Europe, often developing close relationships with monarchs, as Richard Tarleton did with Queen Elizabeth I. The Oxford English Dictionary also notes that fool “has in Modern English a much stronger sense than it had in an earlier period,” when it could be used as a term of endearment and of sympathy. Finally, the root of fool , in French fol , “a mad person” is significant, since many terms show an overlap between stupidity and madness. Two further points of usage are notable. First, the vast majority of terms are habitually applied only to men. Second, while Political Correctness has reduced the currency of unsympathetic technical terms like feeble-minded, brain-damaged , and spastic , the field continues to grow.
Words are drawn in from many categories. There are multitudinous odd and colorful metaphors, such as cement head and lunchbox . Some predictably come from animals of proverbial stupidity, such as donkey and ass; others are less obviously derived from birds, such as coot, loon, drongo , and cuckoo , also found in regional English gowk , “a fool,” from Anglo-Saxon geac, “cuckoo.” Many, like bozo, dork, dweeb , and gink have no proper referential meaning, but are sustained by an apparently appealing phonetic structure. Many compounds show a preference for dumb - in the first element and – head in the second.
As with psychological terms like maniac, psychotic, psychopath , and pervert , words like moron and cretin , originally intended to be specific neutral technical terms for low intelligence have become insults. Although moron is derived from an ancient Greek word meaning “foolish” or “stupid,” it was coined by the American researcher H.H. Goddard in 1910 and adopted in the same year by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded. It referred to a person with mild mental retardation, specifically with an IQ (Intelligence Quotient) of 50-70. However, it was almost immediately taken up in the modern contemptuous sense of a fool or idiot, specifically by Robert Benchley, one of the Algonquin Wits, referring ironically to someone “talking in connected sentences” as being regarded as a “high class moron” Vanity Fair (October 1917, 47). Similarly, cretin was originally (from 1779) a specific term for “dwarfed and specially deformed idiots found in certain valleys of the Alps.” (Its etymological root is, oddly, in christian .) The popular use (dating from the 1930s in D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce) has had the effect of inhibiting the currency of the technical sense. The aforementioned American Association also attempted, perhaps less wisely, to incorporate the established terms idiot and imbecile for specific categories. According to the Encylopaedia Britannica (1999): “The once standard labels—moron, imbecile and idiot—have been abolished.” Similarly, feeble-minded is no longer a generally acceptable term. While this is understandable, it leaves researchers with a problem of terminology.
Idiot has a complex history, dating from the fourteenth century, including earlier senses of “an ignorant or uneducated man,” “an unskilled person,” and a professional fool. The principal modern uses are surprisingly ancient: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath berates one of her husbands for trying to “make an idiot” of another woman ( Prologue l. 311), while Macbeth ends his tragedy (1605) with the famous vision of life being “a tale / Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Signifying nothing” (V v 26-28). William Wordsworth showed an unembarrassed acceptance of the term by giving a poem the title of “The Idiot Boy” in the Lyrical Ballads (1798), whereas Charles Dickens could use the modern insult “You idiot” in 1840 ( Barnaby Rudge , chapter 51). These instances show a marked difference from the modern necessity of euphemism.
A sense of the scale and variety of the modern field can be gained from the following sample: addlepate, airhead, BF [bloody fool], berk, brenda, cement-head, clodpoll, clot, clunk, coot, dickhead, dildo, dingbat, dork, drongo, dumbass, dumbell, dumbo, dummy, dweeb, fruitcake, fuckwit, gink, git, goof, ig man, klutz, kook, lamebrain, lunchbox, lunkhead, mut, nit, noodle, nutter, prat, prawnhead, puddinghead, rookie, schlemiel, schmeggege, schmuck, screwball, section eight, shitkicker, sillybilly, spaz, squarebrain, stupe, thickie, thicko, toolhead, twit, and zipalid. These derive from many varieties of global English, so that few people would be familiar with all of them in the sense of “stupid person.” The list comprises, incidentally only about one sixth of some 300 terms listed in Jonathan Green’s The Slang Thesaurus (1988). A field comprising slang terms will inevitably contain items which in some speech communities are also used in other senses. Thus fruitcake and nutter can also refer to someone who is slightly mad, while prat, schlemiel, schmeggege , and schmuck show the familiar semantic linkage between stupidity and worthlessness. Although dildo is obviously used in other senses, it is notable that sexual terms like prick, tit, twat, and cunt also show this metaphorical extension.
Overall the field shows diminution of specific terms through sensitivity to stigma, but enormous efflorescence of colloquial terms of insult. Several of these have sufficiently complex histories to warrant their own entries. They are listed below.
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