The Etymologicon: A Circular Stroll through the Hidden Connections of the English Language

Ignorami

Christians are all cretins, etymologically speaking, and cretins are all Christians. If this sounds unfair, it’s because language is much less kind than religion.

The original cretins were deformed and mentally deficient dwarves found only in a few remote valleys in the Alps. These days their condition would be called congenital iodine deficiency syndrome, but the Swiss didn’t know anything about that. All they knew was that, though these people had a problem, they were still human beings and fellow Christians. So they called them Cretins, which means Christians.

They meant this in a nice way. It was like calling them fellow humans, but of course the word got taken up by bullies and, like spastic in modern playgrounds, cretin quickly acquired a derogatory sense. So Christian became a term of abuse.

The first idiots were also Christian, or rather the first Christians were idiots. The word idiot first appears in English in the Wycliffite Bible of 1382. There, in the Book of Deeds (which we would call Acts), it says that:

A verse that was translated in the King James Version as:

But in the Latin of Saint Jerome, the passage ran:

St Peter and St John were idiots simply because they were laymen. They had no qualifications and were therefore their own men, rather than belonging to some professional class. If they had spoken their own language it would have been an idiom, and if they had been eccentrics with their own way of doing things (which they undoubtedly were) they would have been idiosyncratic.

Neither cretin nor idiot was originally meant to be an insult. One was a compliment and the other a simple description, but people are cruel and are always casting about for new ways to abuse others. As fast as we can think up technical terms and euphemisms like cretin, moron, idiot or spastic, people will take the words and use them to be nasty to others. Consider the poor moron. The term was invented in 1910 by the American Association for the Study of the Feeble-Minded. They took an obscure Greek word, moros, which meant dull or foolish, and used it to refer to those with an IQ of between 50 and 70. The idea was that it would be a word reserved for doctors and diagnosis. Within seven years the word had escaped from medical circles and was being used as an insult.

Incidentally, moron meant dull, but in Greek oxy meant sharp. Many, many chapters ago we saw how oxygen got its name because it generated acids, and the oxy in oxymoron has the same root. So an oxymoron is a sharp softness.

The unkindest twist of the English language is, perhaps, that which happened to John Duns Scotus (1265–1308). He was the greatest theologian and thinker of his day, the Doctor Subtilis, the philosopher of the univocity of being, master of the formal distinction and of the concept of haecceity, the essential property that makes each thing this, and not that.

Duns Scotus had a formidable mind which he used to draw the finest distinctions between different ideas. This was, linguistically, his downfall and destruction.

When Duns Scotus died his many followers and disciples lived on. They pursued and expanded on his astonishingly complicated philosophical system of distinctions and differences. One could almost say that they, like their master, were hair-splitters and pedants.

In fact, people did say they were hair-splitters and pedants. When the Renaissance came along, people suddenly got rather enlightened and humanist and were terribly angry when Duns-men, as they were called, tried to contradict them with an obscure Aristotelian enthymeme. Duns-men became the enemies of progress, the idiots who would turn the clock back and return to the Dark Ages; and Duns started to be spelled dunce.

Thus did the greatest mind of his generation become a synonym for gormless. This is terribly unfair, as Duns Scotus was full of gorm. He was brimming over with the stuff. And if you don’t know what gorm is, that’s because it’s a fossil word.