Idiot
Encyclopedia
An idiot, dolt, or dullard is a mentally deficient person, or someone who acts in a self-defeating or significantly counterproductive way. Archaically the word mome has also been used. The similar terms moron
, imbecile
, and cretin
have all gained specialized meanings in modern times. An idiot is said to be idiotic, and to suffer from idiocy. A dunce
is an idiot who is specifically incapable of learning. An idiot differs from a fool
(who is unwise) and an ignoramus
(who is uneducated/an ignorant), neither of which refers to someone with low intelligence.
, idiōtēs ("person lacking professional skill", "a private citizen", "individual"), from , idios ("private", "one's own"). In Latin
the word idiota ("ordinary person, layman") preceded the Late Latin
meaning "uneducated or ignorant person." Its modern meaning and form dates back to Middle English
around the year 1300, from the Old French
idiote ("uneducated or ignorant person"). The related word idiocy dates to 1487 and may have been analogously modeled on the words prophet
and prophecy
. The word has cognate
s in many other languages.
An idiot in Athenian democracy
was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs. Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education. In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education (although citizenship was also largely hereditary). Idiot" originally referred to "layman, person lacking professional skill", "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning". Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic
government
of the polis
(city state), was considered dishonorable. "Idiots" were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters. Over time, the term "idiot" shifted away from its original connotation of selfishness and came to refer to individuals with overall bad judgment–individuals who are "stupid
". According to the Bauer-Danker Lexicon
, the noun ίδιωτής in ancient Greek meant "civilian" (ref Josephus Bell 2 178), "private citizen" (ref sb 3924 9 25), "private soldier as opposed to officer," (Polybius 1.69), "relatively unskilled, not clever," (Herodotus 2,81 and 7 199). The military connotation in Bauer's definition stems from the fact that ancient Greek armies in the time of total war mobilized all male citizens (to the age of 50) to fight, and many of these citizens tended to fight poorly and ignorantly.
In modern English
usage, the terms "idiot" and "idiocy" describe an extreme folly or stupidity, and its symptoms (foolish or stupid utterance or deed). In psychology, it is a historical term for the state or condition now called profound mental retardation.
. In the early 1900s, Dr. Henry H. Goddard
proposed a classification system for mental retardation based on the Binet-Simon concept of mental age
. Individuals with the lowest mental age level (less than three years) were identified as idiots; imbeciles had a mental age of three to seven years, and morons had a mental age of seven to ten years. IQ, or intelligence quotient
, is determined by dividing a person's mental age, as determined by standardized tests, by their actual age. The term "idiot" was used to refer to people having an IQ below 30.
In current medical classification, these people are now said to have profound mental retardation.
In several states, "idiots" do not have the right to vote:
The constitution of the state of Arkansas was amended in the general election of 2008 to, among other things, repeal a provision (Article 3, Section 5) which had until its repeal prohibited "idiots or insane persons" from voting.
). Examples of such usage are William Faulkner's
The Sound and the Fury
and William Wordsworth's
The Idiot Boy
. Idiot characters in literature are often confused with or subsumed within mad or lunatic characters. The most common imbrication between these two categories of mental impairment occurs in the polemic surrounding Edmund from William Shakespeare's
King Lear
. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's
novel The Idiot
, the idiocy of the main character, Prince Lev Nikolaievich Myshkin, is attributed more to his honesty, trustfulness, kindness, and humility, than to a lack of intellectual ability. Nietzsche
claimed, in his The Antichrist
, that Jesus
was an idiot. This resulted from his description of Jesus as having an aversion toward the material world.
Moron (psychology)
Moron is a term once used in psychology to denote mild mental retardation. The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement. Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological...
, imbecile
Imbecile
Imbecile is a term for moderate to severe mental retardation, as well as for a type of criminal. It arises from the Latin word imbecillus, meaning weak, or weak-minded. "Imbecile" was once applied to people with an IQ of 26-50, between "moron" and "idiot" .The term was further refined into mental...
, and cretin
Cretinism
Cretinism is a condition of severely stunted physical and mental growth due to untreated congenital deficiency of thyroid hormones usually due to maternal hypothyroidism.-Etymology and use of cretin:...
have all gained specialized meanings in modern times. An idiot is said to be idiotic, and to suffer from idiocy. A dunce
Dunce
A dunce is a person incapable of learning.The word is derived from the name of the great Scholastic theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus, also referred to as Doctor Subtillis, or "Subtle Doctor", whose works on logic, theology and philosophy were accepted textbooks in the universities from...
is an idiot who is specifically incapable of learning. An idiot differs from a fool
Foolishness
Foolishness is the lack of wisdom. In this sense it differs from stupidity, which is the lack of intelligence. An act of foolishness is sometimes referred to as a folly....
(who is unwise) and an ignoramus
Ignorance
Ignorance is a state of being uninformed . The word ignorant is an adjective describing a person in the state of being unaware and is often used as an insult...
(who is uneducated/an ignorant), neither of which refers to someone with low intelligence.
Etymology
Idiot as a word derived from the GreekGreek language
Greek is an independent branch of the Indo-European family of languages. Native to the southern Balkans, it has the longest documented history of any Indo-European language, spanning 34 centuries of written records. Its writing system has been the Greek alphabet for the majority of its history;...
, idiōtēs ("person lacking professional skill", "a private citizen", "individual"), from , idios ("private", "one's own"). In Latin
Latin
Latin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. It, along with most European languages, is a descendant of the ancient Proto-Indo-European language. Although it is considered a dead language, a number of scholars and members of the Christian clergy speak it fluently, and...
the word idiota ("ordinary person, layman") preceded the Late Latin
Late Latin
Late Latin is the scholarly name for the written Latin of Late Antiquity. The English dictionary definition of Late Latin dates this period from the 3rd to the 6th centuries AD extending in Spain to the 7th. This somewhat ambiguously defined period fits between Classical Latin and Medieval Latin...
meaning "uneducated or ignorant person." Its modern meaning and form dates back to Middle English
Middle English
Middle English is the stage in the history of the English language during the High and Late Middle Ages, or roughly during the four centuries between the late 11th and the late 15th century....
around the year 1300, from the Old French
Old French
Old French was the Romance dialect continuum spoken in territories that span roughly the northern half of modern France and parts of modern Belgium and Switzerland from the 9th century to the 14th century...
idiote ("uneducated or ignorant person"). The related word idiocy dates to 1487 and may have been analogously modeled on the words prophet
Prophet
In religion, a prophet, from the Greek word προφήτης profitis meaning "foreteller", is an individual who is claimed to have been contacted by the supernatural or the divine, and serves as an intermediary with humanity, delivering this newfound knowledge from the supernatural entity to other people...
and prophecy
Prophecy
Prophecy is a process in which one or more messages that have been communicated to a prophet are then communicated to others. Such messages typically involve divine inspiration, interpretation, or revelation of conditioned events to come as well as testimonies or repeated revelations that the...
. The word has cognate
Cognate
In linguistics, cognates are words that have a common etymological origin. This learned term derives from the Latin cognatus . Cognates within the same language are called doublets. Strictly speaking, loanwords from another language are usually not meant by the term, e.g...
s in many other languages.
An idiot in Athenian democracy
Athenian democracy
Athenian democracy developed in the Greek city-state of Athens, comprising the central city-state of Athens and the surrounding territory of Attica, around 508 BC. Athens is one of the first known democracies. Other Greek cities set up democracies, and even though most followed an Athenian model,...
was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs. Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education. In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education (although citizenship was also largely hereditary). Idiot" originally referred to "layman, person lacking professional skill", "person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning". Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic
Democracy
Democracy is generally defined as a form of government in which all adult citizens have an equal say in the decisions that affect their lives. Ideally, this includes equal participation in the proposal, development and passage of legislation into law...
government
Government
Government refers to the legislators, administrators, and arbitrators in the administrative bureaucracy who control a state at a given time, and to the system of government by which they are organized...
of the polis
Polis
Polis , plural poleis , literally means city in Greek. It could also mean citizenship and body of citizens. In modern historiography "polis" is normally used to indicate the ancient Greek city-states, like Classical Athens and its contemporaries, so polis is often translated as "city-state."The...
(city state), was considered dishonorable. "Idiots" were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters. Over time, the term "idiot" shifted away from its original connotation of selfishness and came to refer to individuals with overall bad judgment–individuals who are "stupid
Stupidity
Stupidity is a lack of intelligence, understanding, reason, wit, or sense. It may be innate, assumed, or reactive - 'being "stupid with grief" as a defence against trauma', a state marked with 'grief and despair...making even simple daily tasks a hardship'....
". According to the Bauer-Danker Lexicon
Bauer lexicon
The Bauer-Danker Lexicon is among the most highly respected dictionaries of Biblical Greek. The author of the German original is Walter Bauer...
, the noun ίδιωτής in ancient Greek meant "civilian" (ref Josephus Bell 2 178), "private citizen" (ref sb 3924 9 25), "private soldier as opposed to officer," (Polybius 1.69), "relatively unskilled, not clever," (Herodotus 2,81 and 7 199). The military connotation in Bauer's definition stems from the fact that ancient Greek armies in the time of total war mobilized all male citizens (to the age of 50) to fight, and many of these citizens tended to fight poorly and ignorantly.
In modern English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
usage, the terms "idiot" and "idiocy" describe an extreme folly or stupidity, and its symptoms (foolish or stupid utterance or deed). In psychology, it is a historical term for the state or condition now called profound mental retardation.
Disability
In 19th and early 20th century medicine and psychology, an "idiot" was a person with a very severe mental retardationMental retardation
Mental retardation is a generalized disorder appearing before adulthood, characterized by significantly impaired cognitive functioning and deficits in two or more adaptive behaviors...
. In the early 1900s, Dr. Henry H. Goddard
Henry H. Goddard
Henry Herbert Goddard was a prominent American psychologist and eugenicist in the early 20th century...
proposed a classification system for mental retardation based on the Binet-Simon concept of mental age
Mental age
Mental age is a concept in relation to intelligence, expressed as the age at which a child is performing intellectually. The mental age of the child that is tested is the same as the average age at which normal children achieve a particular score....
. Individuals with the lowest mental age level (less than three years) were identified as idiots; imbeciles had a mental age of three to seven years, and morons had a mental age of seven to ten years. IQ, or intelligence quotient
Intelligence quotient
An intelligence quotient, or IQ, is a score derived from one of several different standardized tests designed to assess intelligence. When modern IQ tests are constructed, the mean score within an age group is set to 100 and the standard deviation to 15...
, is determined by dividing a person's mental age, as determined by standardized tests, by their actual age. The term "idiot" was used to refer to people having an IQ below 30.
In current medical classification, these people are now said to have profound mental retardation.
United States law
Until 2007, the California Penal Code Section 26 stated that "Idiots" were one of six types of people who are not capable of committing crimes. In 2007 the code was amended to read "persons who are mentally incapacitated." In 2008, Iowa voters passed a measure replacing "idiot, or insane person" in the State's constitution with "person adjudged mentally incompetent."In several states, "idiots" do not have the right to vote:
- Kentucky Section 145
- Mississippi Article 12, Section 241
- New Mexico Article VII, section 1
- Ohio (Article V, Section 6)
The constitution of the state of Arkansas was amended in the general election of 2008 to, among other things, repeal a provision (Article 3, Section 5) which had until its repeal prohibited "idiots or insane persons" from voting.
In literature
A few authors have used "idiot" characters in novels, plays and poetry. Often these characters are used to highlight or indicate something else (allegoryAllegory
Allegory is a demonstrative form of representation explaining meaning other than the words that are spoken. Allegory communicates its message by means of symbolic figures, actions or symbolic representation...
). Examples of such usage are William Faulkner's
William Faulkner
William Cuthbert Faulkner was an American writer from Oxford, Mississippi. Faulkner worked in a variety of media; he wrote novels, short stories, a play, poetry, essays and screenplays during his career...
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury
The Sound and the Fury is a novel written by the American author William Faulkner. It employs a number of narrative styles, including the technique known as stream of consciousness, pioneered by 20th century European novelists such as James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Published in 1929, The Sound and...
and William Wordsworth's
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
The Idiot Boy
The Idiot Boy
-Poem:The poem is of four hundred and sixty three lines and is written in five-line stanzas with a varying rhyme scheme. It was first published in the Lyrical ballads of 1798, where it appeared between The Mad Mother and Lines Written Near Richmond....
. Idiot characters in literature are often confused with or subsumed within mad or lunatic characters. The most common imbrication between these two categories of mental impairment occurs in the polemic surrounding Edmund from William Shakespeare's
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
King Lear
King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...
. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's
Fyodor Dostoevsky
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky was a Russian writer of novels, short stories and essays. He is best known for his novels Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Brothers Karamazov....
novel The Idiot
The Idiot (novel)
The Idiot is a novel written by 19th century Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky. It was first published serially in The Russian Messenger between 1868 and 1869. The Idiot is ranked beside some of Dostoyevsky's other works as one of the most brilliant literary achievements of the "Golden Age" of...
, the idiocy of the main character, Prince Lev Nikolaievich Myshkin, is attributed more to his honesty, trustfulness, kindness, and humility, than to a lack of intellectual ability. Nietzsche
Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a 19th-century German philosopher, poet, composer and classical philologist...
claimed, in his The Antichrist
The Antichrist (book)
The Antichrist is a book by the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, originally published in 1895. Although it was written in 1888, its controversial content made Franz Overbeck and Heinrich Köselitz delay its publication, along with Ecce Homo...
, that Jesus
Jesus
Jesus of Nazareth , commonly referred to as Jesus Christ or simply as Jesus or Christ, is the central figure of Christianity...
was an idiot. This resulted from his description of Jesus as having an aversion toward the material world.
External links
- Dictionary.Reference.Com "Middle English, ignorant person, from Old French idiote (modern French idiot), from Latin idiota, from Greek idiotès, private person, layman, from idios, own, private."
- "idiot" at Etymonline