Idiot

Etymology

The word idiot entered English indirectly from the Greek noun ἰδιώτης (idiōtēs), which originally meant a private person or individual as opposed to the state, or a private citizen as opposed to a public official or expert. It derived from the adjective ἴδιος (idios), meaning personal or not shared. Over time the Greek term came to signify an unskilled or ignorant person. Latin borrowed idiota with the sense of uneducated or ignorant, and in Late Latin it meant crude or illiterate.

In French the word retained the meaning of illiterate and ignorant, and by the 13th century had added the sense of stupid. In English, the meaning of mentally deficient appeared in the 14th century. A common but incorrect interpretation, promoted by political commentators from 1856 onward, holds that the ancient Greeks used idiōtēs to disparage those who did not participate in public life. This view was foreshadowed by Julius Hare in 1846.

However, no ancient author used the word in a derogatory political sense; its most frequent use was simply for a private citizen or amateur. The derogatory meaning developed centuries later and was unrelated to the political meaning.

Disability and early classification and nomenclature

In 19th- and early 20th-century medicine, an idiot was a person diagnosed with idiocy, a very profound intellectual disability. Dr. Henry H. Goddard proposed a classification system based on the Binet-Simon concept of mental age: idiots had a mental age below three years, imbeciles three to seven years, and morons seven to ten years. Idiots were also defined by an IQ below 30. In the obsolete ICD-9 classification of 1977, such individuals were described as having profound mental retardation or profound mental subnormality, with an IQ under 20.

Regional law

Until 2007, the California Penal Code Section 26 listed idiots as one of six types of people incapable of committing crimes; that year the code was amended to read persons who are mentally incapacitated. In 2008, Iowa voters approved a measure replacing idiot, or insane person in the state constitution with person adjudged mentally incompetent. Several U.S. state constitutions still deny voting rights to idiots, including Kentucky Section 145, Mississippi Article 12, Section 241, and Ohio Article V, Section 6. Arkansas repealed a similar prohibition in a 2008 general election.

In literature

Some authors have used idiot characters in novels, plays, and poetry, often allegorically. Examples include William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, and William Wordsworth's The Idiot Boy. Such characters are frequently conflated with mad or lunatic figures, as seen in the polemic surrounding Edmund in William Shakespeare's King Lear. In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel The Idiot, the title character Prince Myshkin is a man whose innocence and kindness lead others to mistakenly assume he lacks intelligence.