Nincompoop

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˈnɪŋkəmpuːp/

Definitions

1. A foolish or stupid person who lacks good judgment or common sense
2. a person of notably low intelligence or sound reasoning who acts without wisdom
3. someone remarkably deficient in mental acuity and prone to foolish behavior

Etymology: Samuel Johnson, compiling his Dictionary in 1755, thought he could hear a lawyer's phrase inside this insult: Latin "non compos mentis," "not of sound mind," worn down by careless tongues into something you might shout across a tavern. It is an elegant guess and is still repeated, but it fails on the oldest spellings. Many of the early forms, "nicompoop" and "nickumpoop" among them, have no second n, and so no "non" to start from. The Oxford English Dictionary rejects Johnson's derivation on exactly those grounds. The modern spelling, nincompoop, is on record by the 1680s. The old spellings point instead to a crowd of seventeenth-century fool-words. English already had "ninny" and "noddy," and slang knew a "Nickum" as a cheat, possibly a pet form of the name Nicholas. Thomas D'Urfey's comedy "A Fool's Preferment" (1688) has a character cry "Why, you Ninny, you Nicompoop," the two insults standing side by side like the cousins they may well have been. A more literary suspect is Nicodemus, the Pharisee in the Gospel of John who comes to Jesus by night and asks how a grown man can be born again. His earnest literal-mindedness turned his name, as "nicodème," into French for a gullible simpleton. The current OED mentions him as a possible source, but cautiously. The second half may be the obsolete English verb "poop," meaning to cheat, deceive or make a fool of someone. On that reading a nickum-poop, a frequent spelling in the eighteenth century, is a dupe described twice over. A story tracing the word to the Dutch phrase "nicht om poep" has not fared well. The critic John Ciardi dismissed it as a stretched derivation, and etymologists treat it with the same suspicion. The early meaning was a little more pointed than plain silliness. The Dictionary of the Canting Crew, a 1699 guide to underworld slang, defined it as "a Fool, also a silly soft, Uxorious Fellow," a man soppily devoted to his wife. That domestic sting has since faded, leaving only the fool. Some scholars doubt the word was ever meant to be taken apart. Ernest Weekley grouped it with "ninny-hammer" and "noddy-peak," arbitrary elaborations in which a simple insult is padded out for the sheer pleasure of the sound. Ernest Klein thought it was probably invented outright. If so, Johnson's mistake was to look for a learned origin in a word whose main point was how ridiculous it sounds.

Synonyms: fool, idiot, dunce, simpleton

Antonyms: genius, savant