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The difference is in the degree of lexical diversification along the scales of meaning. English seems to have more 'fool' words with more specificity – Japanese seems to have fewer 'fool' words with more vagueness. There are decided pragmatic and communicative advantages to such lexical vagueness.
The Idiot by Evert Larock (1892). An idiot, in modern use, is a stupid or foolish person. 'Idiot' was formerly a technical term in legal and psychiatric contexts for some kinds of profound intellectual disability where the mental age is two years or less, and the person cannot guard themself against common physical dangers.
Moron is a term once used in psychology and psychiatry to denote mild intellectual disability. [1] The term was closely tied with the American eugenics movement. [2] Once the term became popularized, it fell out of use by the psychological community, as it was used more commonly as an insult than as a psychological term.
[1] [2] The word arises from the Latin word imbecillus, meaning weak, or weak-minded. [3] It originally referred to people of the second order in a former and discarded classification of intellectual disability, with a mental age of three to seven years and an IQ of 25–50, above " idiot " (IQ below 25) and below " moron " (IQ of 51–70). [ 4 ]
In the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment wisdom, a valorisation of the irrational, the foolish, and the stupid emerged, as in William Blake's dictum that "if the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise"; [14] or Jung's belief that "it requires no art to become stupid; the whole art lies in extracting wisdom from stupidity ...
Its original pejorative meaning of 'fool, idiot' is largely lost and it is now used to mean "friend", and thus corresponds in some ways to expressions such as "mate ...
The fool is a stock character in creative works (literature, film, etc.) and folklore. There are several distinct, although overlapping, categories of fool: simpleton fool, wise fool, and serendipitous fool. The six volume Motif-Index of Folk-Literature contains (in volume four) a group of motifs under the category "Fools (and other unwise ...
Schmuck, or shmuck, is a pejorative term meaning one who is stupid or foolish, or an obnoxious, contemptible or detestable person. The word came into the English language from Yiddish (Yiddish: שמאָק, shmok), where it has similar pejorative meanings, but where its literal meaning is a vulgar term for a penis.