moron history — how to walk through it without falling

the history of the term moron is best walked through slowly, in shoes you do not mind dragging. step one is 1910. step two is the slow medical retreat. step three is the cultural adoption. step four is the meme. by step four i have caught up. by step four i am, allegedly, a contributor.

i write this from the desk on a thursday, 9:21am, while carla is upstairs in the annual planning meeting on the third floor and i have, generously, the rest of the morning. the elevator is broken again, which is how i ended up walking up to my own floor reading a brass plaque that misspells the year on the building, and the misspelling is what got me thinking about words that aged badly.

“moron” is a word that aged badly. that is the entire post. now we will spend 1300 more words on it because that is the format. the rest of this is what i am calling, against my better judgment, the moron history walkthrough.

writing this from my desk while carla sits through the annual planning meeting upstairs. the elevator situation continues. i have stopped trying to fix it with the building’s voicemail.

if you are new to this whole subject and want the bigger overview, the cluster pillar lives over at the long-form moron explainer and i would start there before you start here, but you are already here, so we will do our best.

step one, the 1910 clinical period — moron history begins in a lab coat

step one in the moron history walkthrough takes place in 1910, in a building that almost certainly had worse lighting than my office, which is saying something. a researcher in new jersey decided that the world needed a new clinical word for a specific bracket of intelligence, and he chose the greek for “dull”, and he wrote it down in a paper, and then other men in similar lab coats nodded and the word entered the manual.

i am not going to say his name. i am not going to link the paper. i am not going to walk you through the eugenics shelf of the bookstore that nobody wants to be standing in front of when their neighbor walks past. that is not what we do here. what we do here is note that the word started as a clinical category that aged badly, and we move on.

my dad used to say that “a word with a uniform on is still just a word, but it gets into more rooms”. i did not understand that as a kid. i understand it now, sitting in the elevator lobby at 9:21am with one ear on a meeting i am not in.

step two, the slow decline of clinical use

step two is the slow medical retreat. this took decades. nobody held a press conference. the word did not get fired. it got phased out, the way an office retires a printer — slowly, with a memo nobody reads, and then one day you walk past the corner where it used to live and there is a plant.

by the second half of the twentieth century, the manual had moved on, the literature had moved on, and the people who wrote the manuals had moved on. the word was now sitting in the lobby of language with no badge and no clipboard, available for anyone to pick up. and people did. people always do.

i do not know exactly when the clinical version disappeared from the official paperwork. i am fairly sure there is a study about it somewhere, possibly in a magazine that uses serif type. i am not going to look it up. that is not the kind of investigation we run on this site.

step three, the insult era, ongoing

step three is the insult era. this is the longest step. this is the step we are still on, mostly. once a word loses its lab coat, it becomes a free agent. people use it on the street. people use it in cars at other cars. people use it in group chats they will mute three days later. dave called me a moron last april for trying to put salsa on a waffle, and dave was right, but dave was also using the word in its third-step capacity, not its first.

this is also the step where the word stops being about a “category of person” and starts being about a “category of moment”. which is a different thing. you can have a moron moment without being a moron. i have, by some count i refuse to publish, eleven moron moments before lunch on a normal day. some of those happen in this elevator.

i wrote down a list of moron moments once on the back of an envelope. it sits in a drawer with my other lists, including the wip 2022 list, which is a piece of paper that has had four hours of work done on it across four years. i pull the wip 2022 list out every january to look at it, and every january it looks back at me, and we have an understanding now.

step four, the meme era, also ongoing

step four is the meme era, which is also ongoing, and which is the step i contribute to. somewhere between 2008 and now, “moron” stopped being an insult you spat and became a caption you typed. it lives on social cards in a sans-serif font, on screenshots, on group chat replies that just say “u moron” and a frog. dave has texted me “u moron” eleven times in the last calendar year. i counted because i was procrastinating.

this is the step where the word becomes oddly affectionate. when dave texts me “u moron”, he is not flagging a clinical category. he is updating my file. there is a tenderness in it that no nineteen-tens lab coat could have planned for, and that is, i think, the only good thing the slope has done. the word turned the corner from diagnosis to nickname. the journey is still mostly downhill, but the last fifty yards are warmer.

if you want to see the meme era pre-baked into a movie, Idiocracy from 2006 made the whole landscape into a feature film. mike judge basically watched step four happen in slow motion and decided to draw a map. the map turned out to be a documentary, eventually, but that is a different post.

i mention this because the moron history walkthrough is hard to do without acknowledging that the slope ends in a movie theater with popcorn. and a fork. (not in a microwave. i am better now. mostly. this is the seventh microwave i have killed and the new one came on a thursday and we are, as a family, doing okay.)

related, the synonyms mirror

moron history is one chapter in a three-chapter book. the other two chapters use the words dumb and stupid, and each of those words has the same shape of slope underneath it. for the bigger word, the one with the longer paper trail and the louder presence at family dinners, i wrote the long-form breakdown over at the stupid pillar piece on the bigger sibling word, where the stupid timeline runs parallel, and the timelines there are different but the staircase is identical. the timelines do not match. the slopes do.

i find that vaguely comforting. i find most coincidences vaguely comforting. dave finds them suspicious. dave is, on this, possibly correct.

verdict, the history is a slope and we are at the bottom

so. the moron history walkthrough has four steps, one direction, and zero plot twists. step one was the lab coat. step two was the retreat. step three is the insult. step four is the screenshot. the slope is not steep but it is long, and we are at the bottom of it, which is also where the elevators end up when the cable stops working, which is what is happening to me right now.

i did not set out, when i started writing this, to learn anything. that is also a rule of the site. but i did notice this: the word’s only good chapter is the chapter where it became a nickname between friends. the lab coat era was bad. the medical retreat era was slow. the insult era is loud. the meme era is, secretly, the warmest. the slope ends with dave texting me a frog and a misspelled noun, and that is fine. that is, scientifically, fine.

this is also the step that confirms HT13, which is that the toilet paper roll goes UNDER, over is for monsters. i know that has nothing to do with the etymology of an insult, but the relevance principle is that i am the one writing, and i think it ties together if you squint. the slope of moron and the orientation of the roll are both, fundamentally, about getting basic things slightly wrong on purpose for decades, and then writing the result into the manual.

the third yoga mat lives under my couch and has lived there long enough to have its own clinical category. step one would be the purchase. step two would be the slow retreat from yoga. step three would be the insult. step four would be the meme. it is the same slope. there is only one slope. the slope is the post.

3:08pm. carla is on her way back from upstairs. the elevator is still broken. she will take the stairs and arrive looking like she did not. that is also a kind of history.