But the dunderhead has a forgotten sibling: the dunderwhelp, who is presumably a chip off the old blockhead. You’re probably familiar with dunderhead, which is one of many noggin-related words for idiots, such as meathead and stupidhead. So a doddypoll has an excessively round head, the kind the owner might let roll away at any moment. The origins of this term-which go back to at least the early 1400s-suggest it comes from a definition of dod: to make a head rounder. The similarity to dizzy is no accident, as lightness of head is often linked to stupidity of brain. Since jesters were also called fools, it’s no wonder the word migrated to Idiocy Land. DIZZARDĪ dizzard was originally a jester in the 1500s. Richardson’s Getting of Wisdom means something close to dunce: “She grew cautious, and hesitated discreetly before returning one of those ingenuous answers, which, in the beginning, had made her the merry-andrew of the class.” 6. The original meaning for this term was a clown-and it’s a slippery slope from buffoonery-that-entertains to buffoonery-that-annoys. That’s how brains work, right? Damn it, I’m a lexicographer, not a brainologist.

But since the early 1800s, a puzzlehead has also been a person who is confused, as if his mind were a Jenga game that went on a little too long. This term isn’t totally out of use, and it does have a positive sense as a crossword or jigsaw puzzle enthusiast. You can see that statuesque influence in this 1948 use from The Aberdeen Press and Journal: “The civic representatives all standing like ‘stookies’ as they had not got the words of the Psalm they were singing.” Stookies are dummies-literally and figuratively. That made for a smooth transition to real people who aren’t much brighter. STOOKIEĪ stookie was originally a type of wax statue or other dummy. The association with drowsiness led the word to the lexicon of idiocy.

Here’s one for someone whose mental choo-choo train is stalled. As a bonus, it has a clear origin: In the 1600s, niddy-noddy referred to an involuntary dropping (nodding) of the head, kind of like when you fall asleep on an airplane, then jolt yourself awake. There’s something childishly awesome (or awesomely childish?) about words like jibber-jabber, higgledy-piggledy, and choo-choo. Its meaning is very close to numbskull, and it has a rarer variation meaning “general stupidity”: jobbernowlism. This colorful word, which sounds distinctly Lewis Carroll-y, has two idiot-related uses: it can be a dum-dum or a dum-dum’s head. When idiots arise, please sprinkle these 11 words for lunkheads into your Facebook posts, think pieces, and doomsday prophecies. Fortunately, there are many old, mostly forgotten terms ready for a revival. Idiots are everywhere. But how often can you use the word idiot without falling into the idiocy of word repetition? Sure, there are other common words such as moron, dolt and dumbass, but those terms are also easily worn out.

Jibber jabber hammer