Who Are You Calling The "Hoi Polloi"?

a humorous disagreement over the proper application of a mildly disparaging term

This post will be a bit out of the ordinary when you compare it to the stuff I tend publish here. It will be (hopefully) both humorous and mildly paradoxical. It stems from a conversation I had on Twitter some time back, where a rather pompous young Oxbridge-educated type decided to weigh in about the one and only meaning that the term “hoi polloi” possesses (and can ever express).

I can’t find the original context within Twitter for the rather one-sided discussion (the interlocutor was there to set us hoi polloi right about the meaning of the expression, not to engage in any real discussion, let alone learn how the proverbial other half lives!), but I can adequately reconstruct it here.

Before that, though, I should mention for those who perhaps haven’t encountered the term what it is that hoi polloi originally means. It comes from Classic Greek, and shows up in a lot of literature. It means, quite simply and straighforwardly, “the many”. It gets used to denote the ordinary run-of-the-mill people, by contrast to those who stand out for one form of excellence or another. So regular people are hoi polloi. Rich people, the notables, rulers, the wise, none of those are hoi polloi (though they might label themselves the aristoi)

If you have a classical-based (or even just, you might say “classical-aspirational”) education, you probably know this original meaning of the term. And you likely also assimilated some of the connotations of it as well. It’s not a simply neutral expression. You can quite reasonably substitute a number of other more explicitly negative terms in its place, for example: “the masses” (perhaps adding “unwashed as a modifier”), “the crowd”, “the mob”, “plebs”, “commoners”, and the like.

So for a long time, “hoi polloi” have been words typically employed and understood by the elite in order to designate the less intelligent but more numerous people beneath them. I myself am from that sort of “hoi polloi”, in terms of my family background. There’s a good chance that many of you readers are as well. You can of course, if you’re fortunate, manage sometimes to raise yourself out of that mass of people and distinguish yourself in some way that sets you not just apart but above, and then often you’ll be looked at differently by the many you no longer entirely fit in with.

Interestingly, the first times I heard “hoi polloi” being used to refer to specific people, it was by regular, working class people. But they didn’t use it as a self-descriptor. Instead, the term had the opposite meaning. For them (and for me, frankly, until I actually learned Greek in graduate school), it very clearly designated an elite. Typically it would be used not just to name any old exclusive and small set, but rather the people who got to make decisions, use influence, buy up stuff, and exclude the many from their parties, conversations, decisions, and policies.

So there’s the paradoxical aspect to it. Somewhere along the line, the original hoi polloi came to repurpose a term that elites had used to designate (and in some manner denigrate) them instead to describe those very elites. It possesses a number of rather negative connotations: snobbishness, being out of touch, just happening to be in charge, high and mighty. Was there any deliberate motive in doing so? Tough to say. It is clear enough, though, that quite a few ordinary people use and understand the term in this modified sense.

My biological father is one such person. He is a retired police chief who worked his way up over decades from patrol officer to a deputy chief position, retired, then took on a role as chief of a sprawling park district. He grew up in the Greater Chicago area, when what are now one big extensive sprawl of suburbs were originally towns and villages. We talk about once a week, and if there’s any discussion of what governmental, business, academic, or police leaders are doing, he tends to call them the “hoi polloi”, almost as a reflex. In my experience that’s pretty common, at least here in the Midwest, particularly for anyone who has worked within a hierarchical organization or company.

Are the regular people, the sorts Alasdair MacIntyre calls “plain persons”, wrong in using the term in this way? Well, it depends on how you look at it, doesn’t it? And that likely depends on what assumptions you have about language and who gets to decide about the definitions and designations of terms. Words do change their meaning over time, and transformations in common usage is one main way that alteration takes place.

In the Twitter conversation years back that spurred these reflections, as best I remember it, some stuffy Oxford guy jumped in to assure all of us plebs that “hoi polloi” was a term that had only one proper meaning, which of course he went to to ponderously explain to us. It means and can only ever mean the many (that is, all of us commoners who don’t know how to use the term right). He confidently assured me (and others in the conversation) of something a bit odd, namely that ordinary people in fact did not use “hoi polloi” to denote elites. His basis for that claim? That he had never run across any instances of it until that very conversation on Twitter. He may have suspected us of just making it up.

If enough people start using a word in a different, even opposite way, the elites are welcome to deplore the newer usage, and within the spaces where they control things, insist upon the “correct usage”. But if enough ordinary people like the new meaning ascribed to the expression, if it seeps into the culture over time, that eventually becomes a new established usage. We are now generations away from whatever reversal of meaning occurred with hoi polloi, a veritable herd-revolt in signification (at least from the perspective of the “correct”-usage elites!).

So “hoi polloi” seemingly has at least two legitimate meanings.

• The common one, used by commoners, now names the elites who the commoners feel want to boss them around and act all “hoity-toity.”

• The less common one, with an ancient pedigree, technically the correct one, depends on having a classical education or at least being around other people who do.

Which one is the “right” one? It depends, doesn’t it, on how you view language use and development, as well as who ought to be the arbiters of “correct” usage.

I leave that open to readers at this point, and will close just by invoking the rather comic image of some prep-school solver-spooner confidently asserting that all and any of us who have heard this phrase being used by ordinary people to refer to the elites in charge are quite simply wrong. Who are those hoi polloi, he wants to know, to claim that the term doesn’t apply to them but to their betters?

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Gregory Sadler is the president of ReasonIO, a speaker, writer, and producer of popular YouTube videos on philosophy. He is co-host of the radio show Wisdom for Life, and producer of the Sadler’s Lectures podcast. You can request short personalized videos at his Cameo page. If you’d like to take online classes with him, check out the Study With Sadler Academy.