┌─╷─┐
╵┌┼┐╵ polyphanes.smol.pub
╷└┼┘╷ by polyphanes
└─╵─┘

return to homepage
return to post index

───╢※╟───

On Meanness

The word "mean" is a fascinating one, with lots of different meanings (heh) available to it. This morning I'm thinking of these meanings: "without dignity of mind; destitute of honour; low-minded; spiritless; base". However, there's also this one, similarly: "intending to cause harm, successfully or otherwise; bearing ill will towards another".

Originally the word came from the Indo-European root *ko-moin-i- that also provided us with the word "common", with much the same meaning as we'd think of it today: "something shared, something general, something universal, something possessed by all". Of course, we also ended up with the word "mean" via the phonological shifts of French and Latin from the Indo-European word *medhyo- "middle". In this case, the word also means "halfway, middling, average, moderate". In a sense, both of these meanings kinda converged under the overall modern English word, and starting in the 14th century, it started taking a similar path as the evolution of the word "vulgar", going from something meaning "common" to something meaning "inferior, low, base". A few centuries later, "mean" started to be used even more pejoratively of "low-minded" or "intending harm", continuing that same evolution of meaning even further, even into the semantic fields of being disobliging, petty, stingy, despicable, and the like—in a word, "unkind". "Kind", of course, is a word that originally refers to categories, types, species, or races of things. It's hard to not be kind if you're kin, after all—the two concepts are etymologically linked! To a degree, we're naturally sympathetic to things that are like unto us. So here we have this word, "mean", that is used to mean being petty and unkind, but with a similar semantic notion as "kind" itself, referring to one's naturally-inclined mental, emotional, and social state when you're faced with something common to you. Weird, right?

It's easy to forget how much in common we share with other people. It's easy to abstract away their suffering and perceptions, their upbringing and fears into some nebulous "other", and thereby separate ourselves (and all we have) from them (and all they have). And, sure, there are many points on which othering might well be useful to deal with the many real-world problems we have. But not all of them, I think, and not all of the time.

A relevant quote from George Carlin:

Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.

I claim that we can indeed do better than the common person, while remembering all that we yet have in common with them. After all, to many others, we, too, are just "common".