Morons rush to look up 'moron' after Tillerson lobs insult at Trump



Photo: 2017 Getty Images Photo: 2017 Getty Images Image 1 of / 210 Caption Close Morons rush to look up 'moron' after Tillerson lobs insult at Trump 1 / 210 Back to Gallery

It was understandable when dictionary searches for the term "dotard" spiked after North Korean supreme leader Kim Jong-un used the colorful, archaic insult to describe President Trump in a speech last month.

After all, dotard, meaning an old person, particularly a weak or senile one, had fallen out of favor as an insult in recent decades until Kim-Jong Un revived it.

But when NBC News reported Wednesday morning that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had used a much more ordinary insult — moron — to describe the president, that too was apparently enough to make people reach for the dictionary, according to Merriam-Webster.

"Moron was among our top lookups on October 4th, 2017 after it was widely reported that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson had recently considered resigning and also had used the word in reference to President Donald Trump," the Merriam-Webster blog post said.

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"Moron" originally came into usage near the beginning of the 20th century as a clinical term proposed by psychologists to describe people with intellectual disabilities, according to the dictionary.

But the use of "moron" in the informal sense to describe a "very stupid person" quickly surged past the clinical definition in popularity, and has persisted to the current day, according to Merriam-Webster, which did not offer any speculation as to why so many people felt the need to look up such a simple word.

"Moron" appears to have enjoyed a popularity peak in 1925 and a lesser one in 1944, then declined until 1983. After that it began steadily rising in popularity again through 2004, when it leveled off, according to Google's Ngram Viewer, which measures the frequency with which words and phrases appear in books.

Filipa Ioannou is an SFGATE staff writer. Email her at fioannou@sfchronicle.com and follow her on Twitter