Interesting History… Did you Know…

[JessiCapri]

[Soniaslut]

Previously posted Oct. 14 2020

[JessiCapri]

ooops….let me find another one then….grins…It was a good one though and well worth reposting so I won't remove it.

[JessiCapri]

[JessiCapri]

[Soniaslut]

                                        [img]https://i.imgur.com/3BNHs6D.jpg?1[/img]

Before “spam” was a word that represented unwanted emails, it was a word that represented the successful repackaging of unwanted meats.

Spam — the square can of pork, salt, water, sugar, potato starch and sodium nitrite that first rolled off the assembly lines more than 80 years ago during the Great Depression — was invented “as a way to peddle the then-unprofitable pork shoulder,” according to The Oxford Encyclopedia of Food and Drink in America. It was the invention of Jay Hormel, son of George Hormel who founded the Hormel company, which pioneered canned pork products in Austin, Minn., in the late 1920s.

According to the company’s Spam Museum, Ken Digneau, the brother of a Hormel executive, came up with the name — a portmanteau word for “spiced ham” — in a naming contest and got $100 as a reward. The new product was introduced on July 5, 1937.

Despite the plethora of early Spam ads aimed at housewives who wanted cheap, quick meals requiring almost no prep, some of the members of that target demographic were hesitant to eat meat that didn’t need to be refrigerated. But it didn’t take long for the U.S. military to find a use for the food innovation. Spam went global during World War II, when America shipped out over 100 million cans to the Pacific, where it made an inexpensive yet filling meal for U.S. troops. As TIME later noted, “Among fed-up fighting men from Attu to Anzio, Spam became one of the most celebrated four-letter words in World War II, gave birth to a flavorsome literature of tales, odes, jokes, limericks.” It remains popular in areas where soldiers were stationed, especially in Hawaii, Guam and the Philippines. Spam also became part of aid packages to devastated Europe and Russia. As the former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev wrote in his memoir Khrushchev Remembers: “There were many jokes going around in the army, some of them off-color, about American Spam; it tasted good, nonetheless. Without Spam, we wouldn’t have been able to feed our army. We had lost our most fertile lands.”

To keep up Spam sales postwar, the company hired singers to tout the product, and even had a radio show Music With the Hormel Girls. Whatever the reason, it worked: Hormel produced its billionth can in 1959, amid rising sales. And yet the Spam-eating Vikings in the 1970s Monty Python’s Flying Circus skit is the pop culture Spam reference most people will remember.

                                        [img]https://i.imgur.com/8SgWpzT.jpg?1[/img]

[Soniaslut]

Only a handful of details are known about the life of Sappho. She was born around 615 B.C. to an aristocratic family on the Greek island of Lesbos. Evidence suggests that she had several brothers, married a wealthy man named Cercylas, and had a daughter named Cleis. She spent most of her adult life in the city of Mytilene on Lesbos where she ran an academy for unmarried young women. Sappho's school devoted itself to the cult of Aphrodite and Eros, and Sappho earned great prominence as a dedicated teacher and poet. A legend from Ovid suggests that she threw herself from a cliff when her heart was broken by Phaon, a young sailor, and died at an early age.

The history of her poems is as speculative as that of her biography. She was known in antiquity as a great poet: Plato called her “the tenth Muse” and her likeness appeared on coins. It is unclear whether she invented or simply refined the meter of her day, but today it is known as “Sapphic” meter. Her poems were first collected into nine volumes around the third century B.C., but her work was lost almost entirely for many years. Merely one twenty-eight-line poem of hers has survived intact, and she was known principally through quotations found in the works of other authors until the nineteenth century. In 1898 scholars unearthed papyri that contained fragments of her poems. In 1914 in Egypt, archeologists discovered papier-mâché coffins made from scraps of paper that contained more verse fragments attributed to Sappho.

Three centuries after her death the writers of the New Comedy parodied Sappho as both overly promiscuous and lesbian. This characterization held fast, so much so that the very term “lesbian” is derived from the name of her home island. Her reputation for licentiousness would cause Pope Gregory to burn her work in 1073. Because social norms in ancient Greece differed from those of today and because so little is actually known of her life, it is difficult to unequivocally answer such claims. Her poems about Eros, however, speak with equal force to men as well as to women.

Sappho is not only one of the few women poets we know of from antiquity, but also is one of the greatest lyric poets from any age. Most of her poems were meant to be sung by one person to the accompaniment of the lyre (hence the name, “lyric” poetry). Rather than addressing the gods or recounting epic narratives such as those of Homer, Sappho's verses speak from one individual to another. They speak simply and directly to the “bittersweet” difficulties of love. Many critics and readers alike have responded to the personal tone and urgency of her verses, and an abundance of translations of her fragments are available today.

                                                    [img]https://i.imgur.com/1IK4JlM.jpg?1[/img]

[Stone]

[img]https://rttlme.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/soviet-pepsi-navy.jpg?w=400[/img]

[JessiCapri]

[img]https://rttlme.files.wordpress.com/2019/04/soviet-pepsi-navy.jpg?w=400[/img]

I worked with a woman who left to take a job at Pepsi in Russia.  The precautions she needed to take just to work there were intense but she looked forward to the opportunity of running the plant that was based there.  She was provided a car and driver at her disposal at all times…long story short…her love of vodka endeared her to the people and she stayed long after her job required her to.  She loves it there.  I love to tell this story because it is one you seldom hear.

[Soniaslut]

How Many American Idiots Are There? 73 Million.
This Wasn’t Just an Election. It was a Census of American Idiots.
by Umair Haque

This was no ordinary election. By now, you know that. But I mean it in a slightly different way. Not just that Trump’s still trying to steal it, and the GOP’s in cahoots. No, I mean that this election was something like a census of American Idiots.
If you’ve been keeping up with the news, you’ve been hearing stories like this. A nurse talks, bewildered, desperate, about people in the Covid ICU. Who are gasping for breath. Plenty of whom go on to die. And as they’re oxygenated and ventilated and intubated, in rage, in fury, they lash out…going right on…denying Covid exists.
What the? How do…deny the existence of Covid…while you’re on your possible deathbed…in the Covid ICU?
And yet you know and I know. This is, unfortunately, tragically, grimly, the phenomenon that I call the American Idiot. The entire world knows by now. Sane Americans shake their heads at such people. But the rest of the world is genuinely staggered, jaw-dropped, banging their heads against the table. How do people even end up like this? So amazingly, well, idiotic? Why does America seem to breed this special kind of person, the American Idiot?
I don’t mean idiot in the way of an insult, by the way. To the Greeks, “idiot” was the ultimate term of scorn. Idiots were the most contemptible people in classical society. Why? The term really means, in the classical context, “people who are consumed only with self-interest.” And to the Greeks, the progenitors of democracy, nobody — nobody was more dangerous than an idiot.
Their reasoning went like this. Should enough of a society be consumed solely with self-interest, a society would soon enough cease to be a democracy. People only concerned with themselves can’t look out for any kind of common wealth or shared interest. They can’t exercise any of the following virtues: courage, compassion, truth, beauty, grace, generosity, kindness, humility, all of which are allocentric, meaning “other-focused,” not egocentric.
So what will happen to such a society? They reasoned that when a society hit a threshold of idiots, it would soon enough lapse into poverty, and then into tyranny. Idiots can’t build a society with any kind of public goods — for the Greeks, that meant things like trust and self-governance. Today it means all those plus healthcare and retirement. Because people wouldn’t be able to provide those things for themselves, as a society, they’d soon enough try to exploit each for them. Society would degenerate into a kind of snake eating its own tail — each person trying to exploit the next. Such a society would lapse into cruelty, hostility, anger, stupidity, ignorance, and folly — barbarism.
And soon enough, a demagogue would come along, who would prey on all those fears — conjuring up imaginary enemies, twisting rage into hatred — and democracy would flash out of existence.
It’s a good theory, when you think about it. What’s remarkable about it is how much more sophisticated and nuanced and intelligent it still is, all these thousands of years later, than what passes for modern economics and political science, which is all too often superficial nonsense. But does the theory hold up?
You only have to look at America, the Land of the Idiots. This election does something remarkable — it gives us a comically exact headcount of American Idiots. There are 73 million of them. That’s how many people voted for Trump.
Am I saying Trump voters are idiots? Of course I am, duh. Again, not as an insult, but as an observation. In the classical sense: people consumed with the narrowest definition of self-interest possible.
Think about the Covidiots for a moment. There they are, in the ICU, gasping for breath…raging at a poor nurse…screaming at her that Covid doesn’t exist. That’s an idiot. It’s someone whose self-interest is so extreme they can’t even admit the possibility that a lethal pandemic exists, because the whole world centres around them.
There are so, so many kinds of American Idiots. The ones who proudly carry guns to…Starbucks…and make their kids do “active shooter drills,” which, for the rest of the world, means that masked armed men burst into schools, pretend to shoot kids and teachers, and they have to pretend to die. The ones who voted against healthcare…again…in the middle of a literal pandemic. The working class heroes who’ve denied themselves retirement for fifty years now…while Wall St laughs. There are the ones who try to pray the gay away and think women should be relegated to child-rearing and domestic chores.
There are so, so many kinds of American Idiots that I’ve barely scratched the surface yet. The truth is that the above kind are the relatively benign ones. Then there are the Proud Boys, literal white supremacists…whom the President put on “stand by.” All those “militia-men,” meaning pudgy dudes with guns playing Rambo. You might think all that’s just a joke, but it’s not — this group is something very much like America’s ISIS. It recently planned to kidnap politicians and assassinate them on live television. They’re domestic terrorists, every bit as extreme as militant Islamic fundamentalists.
What’s remarkable about Trumpism is that it’s the Death Star of the American Idiots. Trumpism unites all the various kinds of American Idiots. In a kind of epic, colossal suicide pact.
What are the American Idiots really fighting for — whether they’re religious fanatics, Covidiots, gun nuts, or bigots? Free-dumb. In the rest of the rich world, freedom now has a modern meaning — it means something like “the set of rights that enable one to enjoy a decent life, from healthcare to retirement to income to childcare to dignity.” But in America, freedom means something so different it’s diametrically opposed: the right to do whatever you damn well please, no matter how harmful it is to anyone else, yourself, your city, town, country, or your loved ones.
Free-dumb is individualism gone thermonuclear, taken to its most absurd outer limits. It means that your right to carry a gun to Walmart is more important than kids getting educations. That you can teach your kids whatever kind of nonsense you want, instead of educating them to be proper members of a civilized society. It means that Justice Amy Coney Barrett can belong to a religious cult with no separation between private and public life — and that’s perfectly OK, nobody should question it. That you can go on “believing” Covid doesn’t exist, while you’re dying of it.
Free-dumb, this fanatical ideology of toxic individualism, is what unites the American Idiots. They’re all pursuing some flavour of it. And what Trump did was give all the various kinds of American Idiots the license to be as extreme in their pursuit of free-dumb as they ever wanted, and then some. Don’t want to wear a mask? Great! That’s your choice. Don’t want to believe in science? No problemo! Don’t think minorities are human beings? Excellent! Are women just there to bleach their hair and serve men? Well done!
Trump, being the ultimate American Idiot, gave every lesser kind of American Idiot a licence to light little fires of idiocy across the land. And now they’re burning out of control. America can’t get a grip on Covid, because the Covidiots keep right on spreading it…since they don’t believe it exists in the first place. Politics is burning down, since the vast majority of Republicans apparently believe the election was rigged. Society can’t make any progress, because the idiots block even the smallest iota of it, crying like big slobbering babies that their free-dumb is under attack. The smallest kind of cultural progress — gay rights, womens’ rights — are at constant risk of reversal, because the idiots can’t abide anyone else being a true equal, since the world has to spin around them, and their ignorance, stupidity, rage, and superstition.
How did all this come to be? Trump printed a licence for every American Idiot to go out and set fire to their own neighborhoods, sure — but why did they think that was a good thing to do? Because America’s a country so backwards it’s hard to explain just how the American Idiot ends up thinking the bizarre things they do. Certainly, the internet reinforces it. Visit an American bookshop, and most of the best-sellers are fanatical right-wing screeds. And American education is something you can opt out of.
So American idiocy is a kind of complex cultural problem right about now. The American Idiot is, we know, three things. One, less educated, as in, often, not very educated. Two, white. And three, downwardly mobile. Those give us standard explanations — the downwardly mobile lash out at even more powerless groups in society, in resentment and rage at their fall. That explains Trumpism’s virulent hate and bigotry.
But what explain Covid patients…on their deathbeds…denying Covid exists?
I think that in the end, all this goes right back to slavery. It set up a kind of Nietzschean-Darwinist dichotomy, which America has never overcome. The strong survive, and the weak perish — deservedly so. Either you’re strong or you’re weak. The weak are subhuman — they deserve their exploitation, abuse, and suffering, because they are liabilities and burdens the rest of us must carry.
If you believe that moral logic — even if you don’t really know you believe it, if it’s something you’ve just imbibed from your parents and elders and towns and cities, like breathing in the air — where do you end up? You end up with five super, super toxic qualities. One, you’re toxically indifferent: you’re unable to care about anyone else very much, because for you, suffering is a form of weakness. Two, you’re toxically fatalistic: you believe everyone deserves what they get. Three, you’re toxically individualistic: you believe that nobody deserves anyone else’s support. Four, you’re toxically reductive: you believe life is black and white. And five, you’re nihilistic: you believe that nobody has any intrinsic worth or value, not even yourself.
You become a kind of twisted, absurd moral caricature, in other words. You think kindness is denying people healthcare — because it teaches them a lesson. You think compassion is making kids pay lunch debt — because it teaches them “fiscal responsibility” (and no, that’s not even what fiscal means.) You think that to show caring, concern, empathy, thoughtfulness or curiosity is weakness. And you think, as you get a lethal disease, and you gasp for breath, that this can’t be happening to you, that it doesn’t exist, because you’re not one of the weak, the hated subhumans — that’s what being intelligent is.
This is the kind of person the world laughs at. Not in glee, even, anymore — but in horror. The world laughs because to most of the rest of it, people so twisted are genuinely almost impossible to believe in. Such people don’t seem to exist — at least in large social blocs — anywhere else in the world.
I’m not kidding. In Pakistan, for example, I can literally buy machine guns or even grenade launchers at the market. But nobody’s shooting up schools and carrying them to Starbucks. Nobody’s suggesting that they’re more important than education, healthcare, or jobs — no, not even the conservatives.
The only real analogue the world has to the American Idiot, really, is movements like the Taliban, or ISIS. Movements who are so fanatical that they develop what Americans call “alternate belief systems.” They believe 72 virgins await them in heaven. The American Idiot believes Covid doesn’t exist, and they can’t get it. That a gun, not healthcare, will protect them from frailty. What’s the difference, really? Not a whole lot. Both of these social groups have developed something like mass, collective delusions, which they cling to inextricably, which nobody can prise away from them, superstitions they believe have the power to save them, which just means make them supreme. It always comes back to supremacy, this problem of human stupidity.
So were the Greeks right? Take a hard look at America, the Land of the Idiots. This election was a census of them, which gave us a precise headcount. America has 72 million American Idiots. What do you about that many idiots? People who vote, ardently, cheer on, applaud, crave, their own self-destruction? Because — just as for ISIS or the Taliban — it’s the one thing that proves their own supremacy, the ultimate test of strength and manhood and all the rest of it? What do you about people so foolish they don’t “believe” in the virus that’s putting them in the ICU?
I have some good news, and I have some bad news. The bad news is that nobody knows. Extremists and fanatics like this destroyed the Islamic world in record time — no, it wasn’t always the backwards place it is now. The good news is they tend to self-destruct. Idiots are martyrs. ISIS and the Taliban are happy blowing themselves up. American idiots are happy denying themselves healthcare and retirement and getting Covid. But also spreading it. The question is, then, how many of us go down with the idiots, as they self-destruct?
The Greeks were right. There is no greater curse for a society than a surplus of idiots, and no greater danger to it than it crossing a threshold of enough idiots. They do lead a nation to ruin, by way of indifference, fatalism, nihilism, selfishness, stupidity, brutality, and violence. They are unable to exercise the basic virtues of goodness, truth, compassion, wisdom, kindness, and concern. This most ancient of political theories — how strange that it’s turned out to be the most accurate one of all. After all, you only have to take a look at America to see it, laughing and shaking its head, down the millennia.
Umair
November 2020

[JessiCapri]

One of the strangest incidents during the Second World War took place in the French town of Sainte-Mère-Église. During the Invasion of Normandy on June 6, 1944, paratroopers of the Allied forces parachuted into the town in the middle of the night.

Some buildings were on fire, so the light from them made the parachutists easy targets for the German forces occupying the town. Some parachutists were sucked into the fire. Many hung from trees and utility poles and were shot before they could cut themselves loose.

The parachute of John Steele of the 505th Parachute Infantry Regiment got caught on the spire of the church. For two hours, he hung there, pretending to be dead, before the Germans took him prisoner. Steele later escaped and rejoined his division when U.S. troops attacked the village, capturing 30 Germans and killing another 11. The incident was enacted in the movie “The Longest Day,” with actor Red Buttons playing Steele.

The above picture was taken when I visited Normandie. 

[Bear]

[Soniaslut]

February is LGBTQIA month

What you need to know and how to take part

With a grey and dismal January behind us, it’s time to celebrate the colourful history of the nation’s LGBT+ community.

[img]https://i.imgur.com/S0mWzlx.jpg?1[/img]

Every February the UK comes together to celebrate the history of its LGBT+ citizens, and this year’s schedule is jam-packed with fun and informative online events.

What does LGBTQIA mean?

LGBTQIA stands for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, Intersex and Asexual.

Outright International defines Questioning as a term for “someone who is not sure how they identify. Someone can be questioning their sexual orientation and/or their gender identity.”
It defines Intersex as “people who naturally have biological traits which do not match what is typically identified as male or female”.
Asexual is defined “an umbrella term used for individuals who do not experience, or experience a low level, of sexual desire”.

What is LGBT+ history month?

Launched by the Schools Out charity in 2005, the event is credited with increasing the prominence of LGBT+ matters and figures in the curriculum of UK pupils.
The event was created in the wake of the abolition of Section 28 which stated that local authorities “shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality”. The act was repealed in Scotland in 2000, and repealed three years later in England and Wales.

The month-long celebration aims to increase the visibility of the country’s lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, with schools encouraged to teach pupils about the history of related civil rights movements and current matters affecting the community.

The celebration has three taglines 'Claiming our past. Celebrating our present. Creating our future.’

Since 2014 the celebration has introduced the Faces For the Year celebrate the life of a famous lesbian, gay man, bisexual and trans person.

This year Lily Parr, Mark Ashton, Maya Angelou, Michael Dillon and Mark Weston are all being recognised as the 2021 Faces For The Year.

The theme of this year’s event is “Body, Mind, Spirit”. Resources relating to this year’s theme can be found here :                                   
                                  https: //lgbtplushistorymonth.co.uk/resources/lgbt-history-month/

A full list of events can be found at :  lgbthistorymonth.co.uk.

[JessiCapri]

In 1856, twenty-three-year-old widow Kate Warne walked into the office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency in Chicago, announcing that she had seen the company’s ad and wanted to apply for the job. “Sorry,” Alan Pinkerton told her, “but we don’t have any clerical staff openings. We’re looking to hire a new detective.” Pinkerton would later describe Warne as having a “commanding” presence that morning. “I’m here to apply for the detective position,” she replied. Taken aback, Pinkerton explained to Kate that women aren’t suited to be detectives, and then Kate forcefully and eloquently made her case. Women have access to places male detectives can’t go, she noted, and women can befriend the wives and girlfriends of suspects and gain information from them. Finally, she observed, men tend to become braggards around women who encourage boasting, and women have keen eyes for detail. Pinkerton was convinced. He hired her.

Shortly after Warne was hired, she proved her value as a detective by befriending the wife of a suspect in a major embezzlement case. Warne not only gained the information necessary to arrest and convict the thief, but she discovered where the embezzled funds were hidden and was able to recover nearly all of them. On another case she extracted a confession from a suspect while posing as a fortune teller. Pinkerton was so impressed that he created a Women’s Detective Bureau within his agency and made Kate Warne the leader of it.

In her most famous case, Kate Warne may have changed the history of the world. In February 1861 the president of the Wilmington and Baltimore railroad hired Pinkerton to investigate rumors of threats against the railroad. Looking into it, Pinkerton soon found evidence of something much more dangerous—a plot to assassinate Abraham Lincoln before his inauguration. Pinkerton assigned Kate Warne to the case. Taking the persona of “Mrs. Cherry,” a Southern woman visiting Baltimore, she managed to infiltrate the secessionist movement there and learn the specific details of the scheme—a plan to kill the president-elect as he passed through Baltimore on the way to Washington.

Pinkerton relayed the threat to Lincoln and urged him to travel to Washington from a different direction. But Lincoln was unwilling to cancel the speaking engagements he had agreed to along the way, so Pinkerton resorted to a Plan B. For the trip through Baltimore Lincoln was secretly transferred to a different train and disguised as an invalid. Posing as his caregiver was Kate Warne. When she afterwards described her sleepless night with the President, Pinkerton was inspired to adopt the motto that became famously associated with his agency: “We never sleep.” The details Kate Warne had uncovered had enabled the “Baltimore Plot” to be thwarted.

During the Civil War, Warne and the female detectives under her supervision conducted numerous risky espionage missions, with Warne’s charm and her skill at impersonating a Confederate sympathizer giving her access to valuable intelligence. After the war she continued to handle dangerous undercover assignments on high-profile cases, while at the same time overseeing the agency’s growing staff of female detectives.

Kate Warne, America’s first female detective, died of pneumonia at age 34, on January 28, 1868, one hundred fifty-three years ago today. “She never let me down,” Pinkerton said of one of his most trusted and valuable agents. She was buried in the Pinkerton family plot in Chicago.

[Soniaslut]

In Ancient Greece the word “Idiot” had a very different meaning than it does today. And the word has undergone several variations in meaning over time.
A little potted history of “idiot”…

The word “idiot” comes from the Greek noun idiōtēs, 'a private person, individual', 'a private citizen' (as opposed to an official), 'a common man', 'a person lacking professional skill or layman'.
It was adopted into Latin by the Romans and “idiota” then took on the meaning of  'uneducated', 'ignorant', 'common', and in Late Latin came to mean 'crude, illiterate, ignorant'.
In French, it kept the meaning of 'illiterate', 'ignorant', but  'stupid' was added as a defenition in the 13th century.
In English, the inference to 'mentally deficient' was attached in the 14th century.

Many political commentators, starting as early as 1856, have interpreted the word “idiot” as reflecting the Ancient Athenians' attitudes to civic participation and private life, combining the ancient meaning of 'private citizen' with the modern meaning 'fool' to conclude that the Greeks used the word to say that it is selfish and foolish not to participate in public life. But this is not how the Greeks used the word though it is certainly true that the Greeks valued civic participation and criticized non-participation.

Thucydides quotes Pericles' Funeral Oration as saying :
“We regard him who takes no part in these public duties not as unambitious but as useless”.

But neither he nor any other ancient author uses the word “idiot” to describe anyone that failed to participate in public life.
In fact not in any derogatory sense at all. Its most common use was simply a private citizen or amateur as opposed to a government official, professional, or expert.
The derogatory meaning  came centuries later, and was completely unrelated to it's original political meaning.

Several authors have used “idiot” characters in novels, plays and poetry.
Very often these characters are used as an allegory to highlight something else.
A few examples of this can be found in William Faulkner's  'The Sound and the Fury', Daphne du Maurier's  'Rebecca' and William Wordsworth's 'The Idiot Boy'.

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel  'The Idiot'.  the title refers to the central character Prince Myshkin, a man whose innocence, kindness and humility, combined with his occasional epileptic symptoms, cause many in the corrupt, egoistic culture around him to mistakenly assume that he lacks intelligence.
In 'The Antichrist',  Friedrich Nietzsche applies the word 'idiot' to Jesus in a comparable fashion, almost certainly in an allusion to Dostoevsky's use of the word : “One has to regret that no Dostoevsky lived in the neighbourhood of this most interesting décadent; I mean someone who could feel the thrilling fascination of such a combination of the sublime, the sick and the childish”.

According to 19th and early 20th century medicine and psychology, an “idiot” was a person with a very profound intellectual disability.
In the early 1900s, Dr. Henry H. Goddard proposed a classification system for intellectual disability based on the Binet-Simon concept of mental age. Whereby individuals with the lowest mental age level (less than three years) were identified as idiots; imbeciles had a mental age of three to seven years, and morons had a mental age of seven to ten years.
The term “idiot” was used to refer to people having an IQ below 30.
IQ, or intelligence quotient, was originally determined by dividing a person's mental age, as determined by standardized tests, by their actual age.
This concept of mental age has fallen into disfavor  in modern times and IQ is now determined on the basis of statistical distributions.

Currently, when defining the word idiot, The Oxford English Dictionary lists that an idiot is:
-most commonly “a person without learning; an ignorant, uneducated; a simple or ordinary person”
-less commonly “a person without professional training or skill”
-in psychiatry “A person so profoundly disabled in mental function or intellect as to be incapable of ordinary acts of reasoning or rational conduct”.
The dictionary also notes that sometimes idiots are people that maintain low intelligence to amuse others by speaking in a stupid way like jesters or fools.

So, as you can see, the word “idiot” has undergone an almost complete reversal in meaning over time.

[Author]

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