Chances are, at some point in your life, you’ve referred to someone as an idiot. It may have been someone driving more slowly than you, in front of you, in traffic. It’s common for people to think of anyone driving slower than they are as an idiot. It’s also common to think of anyone driving faster than they are as a maniac.
Slightly less common than idiot is the term moron. There’s a sitcom on ABC right now called The Goldbergs, and the father in the series is constantly saying to his three children, “Don’t be a moron!” It’s even less likely that you’ve ever referred to someone as an imbecile. Maybe you have, but probably you haven’t.
Interestingly, in the world, there are more morons than there are imbeciles, and there are even fewer idiots. And I don’t mean any of those words as an insult. Neither idiot, nor moron, nor imbecile is an insult per se. But they do qualify as archaic terms.
Before the 1960’s, all three of those words were common technical terms in psychology. An idiot was someone whose IQ score was zero to 25. An imbecile had an IQ of 26 to 50. And a moron had an IQ of 51 to 70. By the 1960’s, though, psychologists wanted to adjust the terms a bit, because idiot, moron and imbecile were rarely used as anything but slang words to describe anyone doing something stupid.
The guy at work who broke the mimeograph machine was an idiot. The guy up the street who accidentally spread grass killer all over his lawn was a moron. And the reason your cousin supported a different political party than you was…he’s an imbecile.
By the 1960’s, those who scored low on IQ tests weren’t discouraged from coming to school anymore. On the contrary, they were integrated into regular classrooms and treated like every other kid, except maybe they got extra help with things like reading and math.
Psychologists were looking for something gentler and less insulting to refer to those individuals, and they settled on the word retarded, which meant slowed down or hindered. It was a perfectly good term, so former morons were now mildly mentally retarded, former imbeciles were now moderately mentally retarded, and former idiots were now severely mentally retarded. This, naturally, worked for about twenty years, until retarded was deemed insulting and was replaced with a variety of terms, from mentally handicapped to mentally challenged to differently abled to those with special needs. And each of those terms also eventually was used as an insult.
I found out something interesting when I was looking up facts about New Mexico, since the Boise State Broncos play the New Mexico Lobos in their next game after a break next weekend. According to many sources on the Internet, you can’t vote in New Mexico if you’re an idiot.
In the New Mexico constitution, which was written in 1911, it said, “Every citizen of the United States who is over the age of 21 years and has resided in New Mexico 12 months, in the county 90 days and the precinct in which he offers to vote 30 days, except idiots, insane persons and persons convicted of a felonious or infamous crime, unless restored to political rights, shall be qualified to vote at all elections for public officers.”
So to vote in New Mexico, you had to be 21, a citizen, a resident, somebody without a prison record…and not an idiot. To me, the interesting part of this revelation is that the New Mexico constitution did not bother to define the word “idiot”. They simply said idiots weren’t allowed to vote.
I didn’t think it was probable that in the 21st century, any state’s constitution still used the term idiot. So, despite many websites to the contrary, I kept digging. Eventually, I found out that I was right, and that the New Mexico constitution has been tweaked a bit.
Here’s what it says now: “Every person who is a qualified elector, pursuant to the constitution and laws of the United States and a citizen thereof, shall be qualified to vote in all elections in New Mexico, subject to residency and registration requirements provided by law, except as restricted by statute, either by reason of criminal conviction for a felony or by reason of mental incapacity, being limited only to those persons who are unable to mark their ballot and who are concurrently also unable to communicate their voting preference.”
That’s a much better explanation. But it doesn’t get rid of what I still consider to be the weird part of the state constitution: Despite all of the wording indicating an idiot isn’t allowed to vote there, I never found anything that said an idiot wasn’t allowed to be elected to public office.
