"Don't Say That. It's Not Nice."

Dr. Esolen:

Word of the Day: stupid

It’s hard not to like our only word that rhymes with Cupid, and actually ought to do so, so foolish are we when the bold boy shoots us with the arrows.

The brilliant and urbane and wicked Emperor Frederick II, ruling from his palaces in Sicily and Cosenza, was called, or had himself called Stupor Mundi. He didn’t mean, Stupidity of the World. He meant that his glory would strike the beholder dumb with wonder. It would, literally, stupefy the beholder; the stupor then, is active and passive in sense at once, referring to the world’s reaction and to Frederick’s causing it. Dante admired Frederick and put him in Hell with the materialist heretics. He admired a second cousin of Frederick a lot more – the man who really ought to have been called the Wonder of the World, then and still now: Saint Thomas Aquinas.

Over the course of the centuries, the word stupor lost its sense of marvel, and, retaining its sense of speechlessness, slud over to kinda mean being reely dum. That sense, though, always was lurking in the wings, waiting to take over. The Latin suffix –idus almost always refers to something at least faintly unpleasant or feeble or ugly. The pejorative nuances survive in English: putrid, pallid, horrid, flaccid, lurid, viscid, acid, acrid, stolid, rabid, torrid, humid, tumid, vapid, timid, rancid, fetid, torpid. Some are neutral: solid. A few are words of praise: lucid, valid.

When I was young, our English textbooks advised us to pronounce the vowel in stupid as a diphthong, just as in Cupid: styoopid. But in northeastern Pennsylvania, that diphthong in such words has all but disappeared if it follows any consonant other than c, f, m, p. So we said stoopid; and the university in North Carolina is Dook, and the lies paraded on television are called the noos, and you listen to toons at the dance hall. It may have been stoopid, but so it was.