The Lexicographer's Friend

This blog not only has readers, but one of them wanted to know what an “eedjit” is. Well. An “eedjit” is a foolish person, or at least, a person who does foolish things. They come in three basic categories. I summarize from John Pepper’s “Ulster-English Dictionary” (who spells it “ijit” for reasons best known to himself).

The first is your basic common or garden variety eedjit. (Sometimes also referred to as a “stupa eedjit” or a “complete eedjit”. But this is not really a change of category; merely a verbal emphasis.) As in “He’s an oul eedjit an I tole him so til his face.”

The second, or middle stage, is the “right eedjit”. This might describe the person who, say, has a good half hour’s worth of material on the “edit your blog” page and the presses the little red “X” in the upper left hand corner of his browser instead of the little “-“ (or minimize) sign. Not that I have ever done that you understand.

And finally we have the “buck eedjit”, the pinnacle (or is it nadir?) of all eedjit-cy. The Other Political Party’s candidate for president, i.e., the one you didn’t vote for, is almost always a buck eedjit.