moron vs fool — small difference, real consequences

moron versus fool is the more interesting fight, in my unsolicited estimation. fools have shakespeare. morons have henry h goddard, allegedly, and a worse origin story. fool is tragic. moron is operational. the supermarket, currently, holds approximately 14 of each. they are all reaching for the same yogurt.

that opening took me, by an embarrassing margin, longer than the memo i was supposed to draft before lunch. the memo is now eight tabs to the left, blinking. moron vs fool cannot wait, because someone in slack just used the word “fool” about a vendor, and i have opinions.

writing this from a swivel chair that squeaks every time i lean back to think. the office plant nearest me died in october. nobody has removed it. i’m taking that as permission.

moron vs fool: a moron is a person making one specific, foreseeable, ordinary mistake — usually in a kitchen, a supermarket, or a meeting they should have skipped. a fool is a much older job: someone who tells the truth on purpose, dressed badly, for a small wage and a worse pension. one is a state. the other is a calling. i have qualified for both, sometimes in the same hour.

FOOL. IS. A. PROFESSION. MORON. IS. A. Monday.

moron vs fool, the surface difference

people use moron and fool as the same coin in different pockets. they are not. they are different coins, minted in different centuries, by different men with different agendas — and one of those men was a psychologist from new jersey in 1910 who’s going to come up shortly and ruin the mood. the other was, broadly, shakespeare, who’s going to improve it.

the surface difference, the one you can use at a bar without being annoying: a fool is hired. a moron is just present. a fool has a costume. a moron has a receipt. a fool is paid in coin and granted speech the king can’t otherwise hear. a moron is paid in dignity, retroactively, by writing a blog post about it from the office.

i looked into the etymology of the moron half — i wrote an entry on what the word moron actually means past the insult — and the short version is that “moron” is barely older than my mother’s dishwasher. fool, meanwhile, has wandered through english since at least chaucer, and through other languages even longer (a side trip i took at moron in english, and apparently elsewhere). the words are not in the same room. they’re not, technically, in the same century.

the shakespearean fool and why he is not a moron

the shakespearean fool, briefly, because you have a meeting at 11. he’s the one allowed to insult the king. that’s the gig. he wears motley — a polite word for “two colors at once and bells on the toe” — and he says, in plain rhyme, the thing nobody else in the room is allowed to say. lear’s fool, twelfth night’s feste, touchstone in as you like it. they are not stupid. they are licensed.

i think about that word a lot. licensed. the fool has a permit. the moron does not. when i put a fork in the microwave for the seventh time, i’m operating without one. dave laughs because the situation is funny, not because i’ve negotiated a comedic license with him in advance. i’m not on payroll for this. i’m paying for it.

the comparative table, my version

warning: the table below was assembled in 22 minutes and is not peer reviewed (the peer is dave, who is asleep, and also owes me $300 — separate matter). here’s how moron vs fool sit when they pretend not to know each other.

print it and put it on a fridge. i won’t know.

real-world examples i collected at the supermarket

i went to the supermarket on a saturday for one (1) thing. i came back with a receipt i folded into my receipt wallet — a word i invented for a wallet stuffed with receipts because the actual wallet is a receipt at this point. the supermarket was full of both species. moron vs fool, in the wild, by aisle.

aisle one, dairy. a man, mid-forties, was holding two yogurts and looking at them as if they had personally let him down. he put one back. picked it up again. put the other back. picked that one up. seven times. he was a moron. i know because i was him; the yogurt aisle is a mirror.

aisle four, condiments. a woman in a denim jacket was walking around with a single sprig of parsley in her hand, looking for the rest of the recipe. i wanted to tell her, gently, that the parsley was being polite — that the dish would not file a complaint if it stayed on the shelf. i did not tell her. that would have made me the moron, and i have a quota.

checkout, lane two. a teenager bagging groceries said, to nobody, “we’re all just doing our best, and our best is, frankly, mid.” that was a fool’s line. a sentence the king cannot fire a man for. i tipped him with eye contact, which is what i tip with when the receipt wallet is full.

verdict, fool is a job, moron is a state

so what does it shake out to. fool is a profession with a uniform, a wage, and a license. moron is a weather pattern that visits, sometimes for an hour, sometimes for the whole of february. you can apply to be a fool. you cannot apply to be a moron. the moron applies to you.

also: fools are remembered. morons are not. a fool’s good line gets quoted at weddings four hundred years after his death. a moron’s third yoga mat ends up under a couch and the couch ends up at goodwill and the yoga mat becomes part of the couch’s infrastructure. that’s the ranking. it’s brutal. it’s the one we have.

does it matter, you ask, with the polite voice of a person starting to feel concerned. it matters because language is, on its better days, a way of telling yourself the truth before you have to live it. it doesn’t matter because, regardless of which word lands on a monday, the microwave is, again, on fire.

where i’d file myself, in this taxonomy

somewhere, more often than i’d like, between the two. on most weekdays i’m operationally a moron — see again the fork, see again the receipt wallet that has, technically, run out of room. on the rare afternoon, with the right beer and the wrong audience, i can pass for fool — say something that lands, get a laugh with a small ache in it, pretend i was licensed all along.

the precise two-syllable shape of “moron” is covered elsewhere, by me, on another lunch break. the pillar is at the moron entry proper, where i confess in print that the shoe fits. this post is about the shoe next to it on the rack — the one with the bells.

the office plant has not, despite my repeated attention, returned. the chair is still squeaking. someone in the break room is microwaving fish, which is a separate tribunal entirely.

the eight tabs to the left are, somehow, now eleven. the memo, a sleeping animal, has not moved. and while we are stacking taxonomies, a hot dog IS a sandwich — bread on two sides, filling between, the rule does not care about your feelings — which is exactly the kind of categorical seriousness this whole moron-vs-fool argument deserves.

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