moron in english — and i guess in other languages too

the search bar suggested moron in english as if there were a moron in french rivaling for clicks. there is not. there does not need to be. a word that already means what it means does not require a passport. carla drifted by while i was thinking this. she did not ask. she rarely does.

3:14pm, on a thursday. typing this from the desk. carla, as noted in the lede, just walked past the row a moment ago, on her way to the security training on the third floor. she has, by my best estimate, the next ninety minutes upstairs. i have, accordingly, the same.

the search bar, when i was researching a separate post on a separate morning, autocompleted my query into a question i had not asked. i had typed three letters and a space. the autocomplete supplied the rest. the rest, in lowercase, no punctuation, full conviction, was a phrase that suggested the word in this title needed a clarification it does not, on inspection, need.

moron in english: in modern english, a moron is a person regarded as foolish or stupid, used informally and mildly insultingly. the word is in everyday english use. the qualifier “in english” is redundant for a word that originates in english (via greek). the autocomplete suggestion exists because someone, somewhere, asked the question. that does not, in this writer’s view, make it a useful question.

IN. ENGLISH. AS IF. IT. NEEDED. THE. PASSPORT.

the redundancy, briefly, with feeling

the phrase “in english” tagged onto a word that is already in english is, on inspection, a phrase doing no work. the word in this title is in english. the word does not require a passport. the word does not need to clear customs. the word, in english, is already in english. you can confirm this by looking at the word. it is in english.

and yet. the autocomplete is not making it up. the autocomplete is, by every available indication, surfacing a query that real human beings have, at some point, typed into a search bar. somebody, somewhere, on a thursday morning, has wanted to know what the word means specifically in english, as opposed to what it means in some other language they may have, briefly, encountered. that is the question. and the question, on inspection, is not as silly as it sounds.

let me say why it is not as silly as it sounds. the longer entry on this word, where i make my full case for the title, goes into the historical clinical bracket. the historical clinical bracket was, briefly, an international affair. there were, in the early twentieth century, equivalents of the word in several languages. the equivalents had, in some cases, slightly different ranges. so the question “what does it mean in english” is, in a charitable reading, a question about the english-specific clinical history. that’s the charitable reading. i’m offering it once. i’m not offering it again.

the uncharitable reading, which is funnier

the uncharitable reading is that the search query was typed by someone who did not, on inspection, know that the word was already in english. that someone had, at some point, encountered the word and assumed it was a foreign import. that someone wanted to know what it meant in their own language. that someone was, by the second filter of the longer entry on a kindred word i covered earlier, in the entry of the word they were searching for. the search, in other words, was self-fulfilling. the search confirmed the searcher.

i’m not, in writing, going to mock the searcher. the searcher and i are, by historical record and behavioral overlap, kin. the searcher and i are in the same entry. the searcher and i, on a thursday morning, are doing similar work. the searcher is asking a question that does not, on inspection, need to be asked. i am, on inspection, writing a fourteen-hundred-word post about the question. neither of us is, by any reasonable metric, ahead of the other.

the false foreign cousin, possibly imagined

i did, comma, do the research, and the research is me, with three tabs open, looking up the word in two other european languages to see whether the autocomplete had a basis i was not seeing. the result was: the word does, in fact, have cognates in several languages. the cognates are, in most cases, similar in meaning. the cognates are, in a few cases, slightly different in tone. none of the cognates, on inspection, were what the search bar was implicitly comparing against. the search bar was, in this writer’s view, comparing against an imagined foreign version. the imagined foreign version is, frankly, more interesting than any of the real ones.

let me describe the imagined foreign version. the imagined foreign version of the word in this title is, in my mind, a slightly more dignified word. the imagined foreign version has more syllables. the imagined foreign version is pronounced with a flourish. the imagined foreign version, when said in a restaurant, would not be heard as an insult by the waiter. the imagined foreign version is, in short, the version a person would prefer to be called. the imagined foreign version is, accordingly, the version that does not exist.

the english version, the actual word, has two syllables and a soft ending. my notes on a related english word, the one i had been misreading for nine years, contain a longer treatment of how english tends to land insults more bluntly than its romance cousins. the treatment is in the file. it does not need to be repeated here.

the security training, briefly, the way it always goes

the security training, by the way, is a quarterly meeting on the third floor that carla, by tradition, attends, and that i, by what i’d call a quiet historical understanding, do not. the boss, who is in another meeting and has been since 2021, has not, in any explicit way, told me i should attend. the boss has, in fact, in three separate emails over three separate quarters, told me i should “focus on my deliverables”, which is a phrase i have, on each occasion, taken to mean: “do not come to the security training.”

so carla goes. carla goes with a printout. carla comes back, ninety minutes later, with the printout slightly more wrinkled. carla does not, on her return, look at the row. carla, in this respect, is, on the matter of my work habits, my closest collaborator and my best ally. beach vacations are punishment with sand, incidentally, but that’s a hot take for a different post.

stefan, who definitely has opinions about translation

stefan, who shows up at the bar with opinions on translation he has not, in any sense, validated, told me on monday that the word in this title “doesn’t translate well.” stefan used those exact words. stefan said them with the of a confidence man who had read, by his own admission, “a piece” on the topic, somewhere, in 2018, that he could not, on the spot, locate.

i did not, on the monday, ask stefan to elaborate. i did not, on the monday, ask stefan which language he had in mind. i did, on the monday, watch stefan order a second beer and segue into a story about a friend of his who had, allegedly, lived abroad. by the third beer, stefan was telling me that “every language has its own version” of the word, which is a sentence so generic it does not, on inspection, contain a falsifiable claim.

the data point i extracted from monday’s conversation was: stefan, when given the chance to discuss translation, will discuss anything except translation. that data point is, in its own way, evidence that the question of how the word in this title translates is, on the bar circuit, a question that does not survive the second beer. on the search-bar circuit, by contrast, the question survives long enough to autocomplete. that is the entire gap. the gap is, by my measurement, approximately one beer.

verdict, the qualifier is redundant, the question is funny, the post is here