Another Reason Why Jews are the Chosen People....

Here's an interesting tit-bit (remember the spell-checker problem?) that relates to my last super-relevant posting "Psychology Today". Read on and be enlightened.....

The English borrowed cretin from the French word cr�tin in 1779. It comes from an earlier word, cretin, which meant "Christian" in the (French) dialects of Valais and Savoie (compare the standard French word, chr�tien). Its ultimate source is the Latin christianus, "Christian".

While the original meaning of cretin was, literally, "Christian", the word "Christian" was not being used as we would use it today. In our pluralistic, multi-cultural society, we recognize Christianity to be just one of many competing belief systems. Thus, to say that someone is a Christian is to state that s/he is not a Buddhist, a Marxist, a Hindu or a Jew. This seems rather obvious to us, doesn't it? Yet this wasn't quite how the word was understood by the medieval inhabitants of remote Alpine valleys. From their limited and parochial perspective it seemed that everyone in the world was Christian. Thus, the word became synonymous with "human being".

Due to the lack of iodine in the medieval Alpine diet, certain regions of Switzerland were prone to severe thyroid problems, such as goiter and congenital idiocy. The local priests, moved by compassion for these poor imbeciles, encouraged the populace to treat them kindly. They deserved pity, it was said, because they were, at least, Christians (i.e. "human beings").

We must admit that we were quite surprised to find that the word Christian itself was not used in English until 1526. How did English-speaking Christians refer to themselves before that date? Did they not need such a word before they came into contact with non-Christians?

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Yeah, Buddy! There you have it!

Psychology Today

Wow. OK!

It's been some time since I posted anything on this yere blog. No one misses it, except maybe Trey Sensation, and he's a moron. Well, that's harsh. Maybe he isn't. He may be an idiot, or an imbecile.

Which is my segue into the theme of this post!

My friend the CFO is fond of the old-timey IQ classifications, but, as is often the case, he doesn't have the facts. We were never quite sure of the heirarchy, and thence, unsure of the correct label to apply to someone one wishes to disparage (or upgrade, as in the CFO's case). I have always meant to look them up, but never remembered to do it. So, I will quickly divert my attention away from blogging to do a bit of research. Off I go to Google.

dumdydumdydumdumdum.

All righty then! I'm back with the facks.

These are the old IQ classifications which were used, incredibly, up until the 1970's!

In case you were wondering.

IQ range for each classification: 70-80 Borderline deficiency
50-69 Moron
20-49 Imbecile
below 20 Idiot

So now you know. This means it's actually good to be a moron! My name-calling above wasn't so harsh after all.