The Greeks Had a Word for It

[a note on condescension]

In the 2013 film Philomena, Judi Dench, as the eponymous¹ heroine who is in the habit of narrating in excruciating detail the plots of the romance novels she’s fond of,² recounts at one point a church wedding scene in which masses of aristocrats are assembled: “the hoi polloi,” she notes.

Let us pause and consider, for there’s a lot to unpack here.

First, we must note, “hoi polloi” comes from the Greek, and what it literally means is “the many,” or, as we sometimes like to call that crowd, the masses. Or ordinary people (a phrase always used in an embrace-the-public fashion by those who regard themselves as anything but ordinary and that always strikes me as appallingly patronizing). Or the great unwashed, which is probably what most people who use the term are thinking if not willing to say publicly. And as “hoi polloi” literally means “the many,” it is objectionable—to some—to, then, use the term “the hoi polloi,” which literally³ translates to “the the many.”⁴ But (and gosh, I just love the Merriam-Webster folk) that is “an opinion that fails to recognize that hoi means nothing at all in English.” Speaking for myself alone, I’d have a hard time asserting that, say, Jim Varney’s Ernest movies are largely of interest to hoi polloi; the absence of the “the” would mark me, if the use of the phrase at all hadn’t already, as guillotine bait, don’t you think? (For the record, I can, without breaking a sweat, find innumerable uses, from reputable writers, of the phrase “the hoi polloi” going back to the earlyish nineteenth century, so this particular horse is certainly not only out of the barn but at least three counties over by now.)

But getting back to Dame Judi, what “[the] hoi polloi” seems not to mean at all, then, is “aristocrats.” So what’s going on here in Philomena? Well, sometime in the twentieth century, “hoi polloi” began to redefine itself to mean “fancy people,”⁵ which seems improbable till, perhaps, you pause to consider the manner in which the term “nonplussed” has redefined itself these last few decades from “surprisedly perplexed” (which is what it means, ffs) to “cool as a cucumber,” a redefinition I must recognize as occurring even as I condemn in no uncertain terms its occurring, in part because I’m a stuck-up prescriptivist⁶ but, more important, as it’s going to lead, if it hasn’t already, to the complete uselessness of the word to mean anything at all. As to “hoi polloi,” the redefinition can likely be laid at the feet of the similarity of the sound of “hoi polloi” to that of “hoity-toity,” an adjective often applied to people who are fancy-shmancy. Also, I guess, “hoi polloi,” being foreign and all, sounds both hoity-toity and fancy-shmancy. All that said, might we please, if we must use the term at all,⁷ use it as it was originally intended? Is that asking too much?⁸

Moving on: If hoi polloi is Greek, why am I not setting it in italics as hoi polloi? That’s a relatively easy one. When non-English words are glommed up into the English language, we domesticate them by setting them in roman type (the straight up-and-down letters) rather than in italics (the aslant ones), and that goes for—beyond hoi polloi—sushi, kibbutz, hors d’oeuvres, and myriad others. We in the copyediting biz used to hold to the rule that if a word could be found in the main section of (here they are again) Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, one set it in roman; if it couldn’t be found at all, or was relegated to the backmatter appendix of non-English words and phrases, one set it in italics. Nowadays, particularly as we use the print version of the dictionary less and less in favor of the always-up-to-the-minute online version, it might be easier to say that if a word feels like English it might well be English.⁹

One last thing on the way out the door: I was wondering this morning about the origin of the saucy-sounding “the Greeks had a word for it,” with which I’ve adorned this essay, and though I’d’ve guessed that it derives from Much Ado About Nothing, or As You Like It, or some other Shakespearean comedy with an interchangeable title, it seems to go back no further than to a 1930 comedy by Zoë¹⁰ Akins, originally titled The Greeks Had a Name for It (which doesn’t sound quite as saucy, I think) and later filmed as The Greeks Had a Word for Them (which sounds positively filthy). The more, as they say, you know.

1. A footnote so soon? Sure, why not. Our friends at Merriam-Webster remind us that “eponymous” means “of, relating to, or being the person or thing for whom or which something is named,” which is to say, for instance, that Hamlet is the eponymous protagonist of William Shakespeare’s play Hamlet (and also that Hamlet is an eponymous play; like “namesake,” “eponymous” works in both directions). You might also refer to Hamlet as the title character of Shakespeare’s tragedy, as you might refer to “Court and Spark” as the title (or, for that matter, eponymous) track of Joni Mitchell’s album Court and Spark, but I would beg you to avoid the johnny-come-lately use, in such cases, of “titular,” which is best used (again, back to Merriam-Webster) to mean “having the title and usually the honors belonging to an office or dignity without the duties, functions, or responsibilities.” For most of my career the standard illustration of the use of “titular” has been to note that Queen Elizabeth II was the titular head of the Church of England; now we must say that her divorcé son Charles fulfills that role, which presumably amuses the shade of the erstwhile (or quondam, or simply former) Edward VIII, wherever he may be.

2. Or, if you prefer, “the romance novels of which she’s fond.” I don’t prefer.

3. I’m not much keener on using the word “literally” literally than I’m keen on using it to mean “figuratively,” than which I would rather die, but sometimes you just need it. Or want it.

4. See as well “the La Brea Tar Pits.”

5. In the early-1930s pop hit “’Long About Midnight,” the unpretentious residents of Harlem are commended for “not pretending, like the hoi polloi.”

6. Except when I’m not, which is why I tend to refer to myself as a descriptoprescriptivist. And I’m telling you, kids, when it comes to being inflexibly dogmatic, nothing beats a soi-disant (oh, look it up) descriptivist.

7. I won’t say that we mustn’t, but surely we needn’t.

8. I long wondered whether Philomena’s use of the term was a screenwriter’s error or an intentional and subtle bit of characterization for someone who is herself one of the hoi polloi—so subtle that, as far as I know, I’m the only person who’s ever noticed it. I’ve settled on believing the latter.

9. There’s a larger conversation to be had here about the use, at all, of italics for non-English material in English-language books, but we’ll have that larger conversation another time. (I seem to have given up entirely the use of the phrase “foreign-language material,” which is, to be sure, part of that larger conversation too. More anon.)

10. I wasn’t sure, when I first posted this little party piece, whether Ms. Akins spelled her name Zoe or Zoë (various sources went various ways), and it took me a couple of days to remember that I know how to google things, and I quickly found two examples of her signature, and indeed she signed her first name as Zoë. Interestingly enough (at least interestingly enough to me), one can find it both ways in print, including on the title pages of playbills for her own plays, which is a good reminder that typesetters can be a bit lackadaisical about accent marks. I note as well, as long as we’re here, that Noël Coward’s name frequently shows up in print as Noel, including in the credits and on posters for his own films. In these particular cases those two dots are properly referred to as a dieresis (or diaeresis, if you really like a vowel pile-up), not, as would be appropriate in German, in which the dots serve a different purpose, an umlaut. A certain magazine that need not be named but which is often somewhat, shall we say, uncoöperative when it comes to the evolution of the English language is rather addicted to them, as you may well have noticed.