Everybody knows what the word "idiot" means, right? It means a person of low intelligence, somebody who doesn't know grits from granola, somebody who couldn't find his or her ass without a flashlight and a map. Maybe you think the President is an idiot. It's likely that you think that Congress is a bunch of idiots. The mayor of your town, the sheriff of your county, the bloviating jerkoffs on teevee, the driver who cut you off on the exit ramp on the freeway: they're all idiots.
We keep using that word. I do not think it means what we think it means. Please read on for a brief history of idiocy, and why we should not insult the developmentally disabled by comparing them to mere idiots.
According to the Merriam-Webster Book of Word Histories, the term "idiot" derives from the Greek verb idios (ἴδιος), meaning "one's own" or "private". This root is shared by words such as "idiosyncracy", (one's unique, personal habits), "idiolect", (a personal way of speaking; "private language"), and "idiopathy" (a disease generated from within one's own body). The original sense of the word was "one who does not participate in public affairs", as in: "Strepsiades, I did not see you at the agora this morning. Are you an idiot?"
From this sense came the sense 'common man' and later 'ignorant person'--a natural extension, for the common people of Greece were not, in general, particularly learned. The word was borrowed from the Greek into Latin as idiota, whence Frech has idiote, which in turn became a loanword in English in the thirteenth century.
According to the same source, it was not until the end of the sixteenth century CE that the word "idiot" came to mean an incompetent person:
By carrying ignorance to extremes, we arrive at the idiot who is mentally deficient. An English lawyer, Henry Swinburne, defined this idiot, in 1590: "An idiote, or a naturall foole is he, who notwithstanding that he bee of lawfull age, yet he is so witless, that hee can not number to twentie, nor can he tell what age he is of, nor knoweth not who is his father, or mother, nor is able to answer to any such easie question."
And thus we come to the current usage of the term "idiot", meaning an insufferably stupid person, as exemplified by this quote from our own American man of letters, Mark Twain:
Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.
Mr. Twain may have had the sense of the word just right, and he almost certainly was expressing the popular opinion of the time, but technically, he got it wrong: members of Congress (then and now) are the opposite of idiots.
The idiots who are wrecking our country are the ones who fit the description of the old, original word: the ones who stay home on election day. I propose that we begin to call out our friends, our families, our co-workers, our classmates and our kids. Let us take back this word and use it to our advantage. If you know someone who insists that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans, tell him or her that he/she is an idiot--then tell him or her why.