moron — i looked it up, i qualify

i looked up the word and the historical bracket was iq 51 to 70. i read it twice. then i performed a small audit of my last 48 hours, including the fork incident, the third yoga mat, and the certified letter still on the counter. the bracket holds. i qualify with room to spare.

desk, monitor, quiet floor. carla went up to the budget review with a folder and the face of someone preparing for trench warfare. the rest of the morning is, by every reasonable metric, mine.

the result of the search was, as is often the case with searches conducted on company time, both surprising and exactly what i deserved. moron is, it turns out, a real word with a real history, and the history is not flattering. but i am, and i say this with the full posture of a man whose phone is at 23% battery and who has hit the snooze for nine minutes three times this morning, going to embrace it. you’ll see why.

moron: a person regarded as foolish or stupid. historically, in early 20th-century classification, the term was used to describe someone with a specific (and now obsolete) cognitive measurement, alongside the categories “imbecile” and “idiot”. today the word is informal, mildly insulting, and, in my opinion, due for a reclamation. that’s where i come in.

YES. I QUALIFY. AND I’M FINE WITH IT.

what moron actually means, the historical definition

the word, before it became something a frustrated coworker mutters at the printer, had a specific clinical meaning. it referred, in the early 20th century, to people in a particular range on what were then the official scales — somewhere above “imbecile” and a comfortable distance below the average. i looked it up. the source, i won’t name, but it was the kind of public-knowledge encyclopedia that anyone with a thursday and a working keyboard can locate. that’s all i’ll say. let’s just call it a website that has things on it.

the categories, as they existed, were a taxonomy. a taxonomy of stupid. moron sat at the top of the taxonomy, which is to say, the smartest of the not-smart. the upper class of the lower bracket. the silver medal of the participation trophy division. i find this thrilling. it means moron, in its original sense, was actually the high end of the spectrum it described. you were a moron, you were doing well, comparatively.

this entire taxonomy, by the way, has been thrown out. they don’t use it anymore. the categories, the ranges, the names — gone. which means the word “moron” is, in the strict sense, a retired term. a word with a pension. and i, by sitting at this desk and using it about myself, am putting it back to work. that’s a public service. you’re welcome.

moron vs idiot vs imbecile, a taxonomy that no longer exists

the three words used to mean three different things. that’s the part most people don’t know, and the part i was, on a thursday morning with too much coffee and too little to do, delighted to discover.

idiot was the lowest tier. imbecile was the middle. moron was the top. they were not synonyms. they were a ladder. the ladder is no longer in service, but the rungs are still in the language, where they have lost their order entirely. now they all just mean “this person is annoying me”. progress, i think.

here’s the thing nobody tells you. when somebody calls you an idiot, today, in 2026, in a parking lot, what they mean is “i am unhappy with your driving”. they do not mean “you have scored, on a now-disowned 1908 scale, in the lowest tier of human cognition”. context is everything, as mike said to me one tuesday between 9 and 10pm at the corner. mike, for what it’s worth, has a system for taxes. the system, as i understand it, is that he has not filed since 2019. mike sleeps fine.

i am, for the avoidance of doubt, not making fun of any of this. the categories were used in real ways with real consequences and the consequences were not good. that’s why they were retired. i am, however, going to take the word that survived the cull and use it on myself, because the word is now lying around unused and i need a hat.

why i embrace the term, it’s a reclamation

let me say this clearly. i am a moron. i have always been a moron. and i would like, today, on company time, in this post, to claim the title officially.

this happens to be what some friends call a thoughtful comparison between two words you thought were the same. i did not call it that. she did. she’s wrong about most things, but she’s right that words have textures. moron has the texture of someone who has tried, and tried with confidence, and who still ended up at this desk on a thursday writing this post.

examples of moron behavior i exhibit weekly

the test for moronism is not theoretical. it’s empirical. you don’t need a scale. you need a tuesday. here is a list, drawn from the last seven days, of behaviors i exhibit that are, by any reasonable definition of the word, moronic. they are not lies. they are not exaggerations. they are, as they say, the public record.

• i hit the 9-minute snooze three times. every morning. without fail. i have done the math on what this costs me in life-hours and the math is upsetting, so i stopped doing the math, which is itself a moron move.
• i let my phone hit 23% battery and then i panic. i carry a charger. i don’t plug it in. i wait until 9%. then i blame the phone.
• i opened a tab to look up the word “moron” at 3:14 and now it is 10:14 and i have written 600 words about it, which is not what my employer pays me for, and i know this, and i am still doing it.
• i sent a DM, two saturdays ago, to someone i had not spoken to in seven years. i typed it. i sent it. i regretted it before i hit send. i hit send. they have not replied. i check the DM, on average, four times a day. i will check it after i finish this post. i’m not proud of any of this.
• i have, in my apartment, a yoga mat purchased in 2023 and used once. i have, in my apartment, a kitchen appliance purchased in 2024 and used twice. i have, in my apartment, a list, on a post-it, of all the appliances i own and have not used. the list is itself an appliance i have not used.

five examples. one week. that’s the empirical definition of moron, applied to a real person, namely me, sitting at this desk, on company time.

the famous morons, a list i compiled

i was going to put together a list of historical morons for context, but most of them are dead and have lawyers. so instead, here are the morons, real and fictional, who have given me, personally, comfort. by which i mean: when i feel bad about being a moron, i think of these people, and i feel slightly less bad.

at the top of the list is homer simpson, the patron saint of confident wrongness. homer has been wrong, on television, for thirty-five years, and he has never once been quiet about it. he eats with both hands. he loves his family. he kills, on average, one workplace appliance per week. i see myself in homer. i suspect homer would not see himself in me, but that’s because homer has things to do.

the rest of the list includes a few sitcom characters i won’t name, a couple of friends of friends i can’t legally name, and a regular at the corner whose principles, while not technically moronic, are not principles a licensed advisor would endorse. he is, as i mentioned, on the tax system referenced earlier. he has not filed in some years. he is, by every visible metric, content.

the point is: morons, broadly, do not seem to suffer the way the smart suffer. the smart, who know things, who have read books on tape (books on tape are cheating, i am on the record about this, i stand by it), who have systems and goals and a calendar with colors — the smart, in my experience, tend to be tired. tired and on a thread. the morons, the actual confident morons, are not tired. they are, however, frequently in the wrong line. there’s a tradeoff.

the case for moronism as a worldview

i’d like to argue, briefly, that moronism — embracing the title, wearing the hat, leaning into the high end of the lower bracket — is, in fact, a viable life strategy. let me explain.

the smart spend their lives optimizing. they read white papers. they listen to podcasts, which, as i may have mentioned, are books on tape with worse pacing, and which the smart have somehow convinced themselves are content rather than the same audio essay played back at 1.5x speed. the smart have a sleep tracker. the smart have a budget app. the smart have, somewhere, a spreadsheet with their goals on it, and a separate spreadsheet with the goals for the goals.

the moron has none of this. the moron has a 9-minute snooze and a 23% phone battery and a hot take, which is that ice cream is breakfast — it contains milk. the moron has, instead of a budget, a vague sense of how the month is going. the moron is not winning, but the moron is also not, on a sunday at 4pm, weeping into a hydration tracker.

i’m not saying this is the better life. i’m saying it is, in fact, a life. it has the same number of hours. the hours are spent differently. some of the hours are spent looking up the word “moron”. some of the hours are spent eating ice cream at 8:30am because, as i have argued, repeatedly, ice cream is breakfast. it contains milk. it has dairy. it has the calorie content of breakfast, plus some. the smart will argue with me on this. let them. they have podcasts to listen to.

stefan would argue with me on this, for example. stefan is a friend. stefan, on his second glass of wine, has opinions about most things, including breakfast, and stefan would tell me, with the patience of a man who has been to a wine tasting, that ice cream is dessert. stefan is wrong. stefan also told me, on a different evening with the same wine, that morons are a “social construct”. stefan reads, in his words, “fairly seriously”. stefan has a degree in something. i have never confirmed which. i nod.

self-test, am i a moron

i made a quick test. i am, of course, going to fail it. but you can take it too, on company time, while your version of carla is in their version of the meeting. score one point per yes.

1. do you hit snooze three or more times most mornings?
2. is your phone, right now, below 30% battery?
3. have you, in the last seven days, sent a message you regret?
4. do you own at least one piece of fitness or wellness equipment that has been used fewer than three times since purchase?
5. do you, in any conversation about food, hold a position that the medical community would consider “concerning”?
6. do you have, somewhere, a tab open from a search you don’t remember initiating?
7. did you, today, do something that you knew, in the moment, was not in your best interest, and do it anyway?

if you scored four or more, congratulations. you are a moron. welcome. there’s room. the snacks are not great but the company is honest.

carla appeared briefly between my monitor and the printer. i tab-switched to a spreadsheet i keep open for moments like this. she did glance toward the screen. she did not stop. on balance, a neutral signal.

verdict, yes, and i’m fine with it

the notification, somewhere on this laptop, is buzzing to tell me about an email i will not open. that’s the post. that’s the topic. that’s a thursday morning, at the desk, with the rest of the budget meeting still to go on the third floor.

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