idiotistic

English

Etymology

(This etymology is missing or incomplete. Please add to it, or discuss it at the Etymology scriptorium.)

Adjective

idiotistic (comparative more idiotistic, superlative most idiotistic)

1. (linguistics) Specific to one idiolect.
   • 1890, The Encyclopaedia Britannica:

     He ridicules the ambition of German writers to be classic, as Lessing had ridiculed their eagerness to be French. “Let us,” he says, “be idiotistic writers, adapting ourselves to the peculiarities of our people and our language; whether we are classic posterity may find out."

   • 1990, Hugo Bekker, William C. McDonald, Winder McConnell, Fide Et Amore:

     This lexical archive of intra-dictionary citations will continue to be built as the fascicles of the dictionary appear. Its primary purpose is to counteract any lingering idiotistic characteristics that the original database for the dictionary may have had, and to make optimum use of citations which are complete and for which the addresses and time and place designations have been determined.

   • 1990, Ulrich Goebel, Oskar Reichmann, Peter I. Barta, Historical lexicography of the German language - Volume 1, page 217:

     In general, these glosseries are idiotistic in nature, i.e. the editors of the texts have concentrated on items for their glosseries which are linguistically significant for that specific document and which may be typical for a particular author from a particular language area, writing at a particular time, , but not representative of the total vocabulary in the text, to say nothing of the Early New High German lexicon as it is documented in all of the texts selected for the corpus of sources.

2. (informal, nonstandard) Synonym of idiotic
   • 1998 May 21, MacFS User, “DOUBLE HEADED EAGLE”, in soc.culture.greek (Usenet):

     Further, you will not acieve your anything by posting idiotistic threads like these, apart from resorting to spam and swearing.

   • 2005 December 7, Anraku, “Why is modern”, in talk.religion.buddhism (Usenet):

     you idiotistic suburbanite nincompoop yuppie crackpot, why don't you just shut up?

   • 2009, Erin Cooney, “What is an Idiot”, in Poetry and a Fifth Grade Cinderella: An Anthology From Nebraska, →ISBN:

     An idiot is someone who is a perfect example of idiotism, who is idiotistic, idiotic, full of idiotness, uses idiot cards, watches an idiot box, and/or is clearly brimming with idiocy.