‘Mid’: the very-online’s favorite insult

Have you heard “mid?” The very-online no longer call something “bad” or “dumb” or “crap” or “a shit-festooned barnacle attached to the culture.” They call it “mid.” As in “middling.”

In one of the nontroversies that regularly grip Twitter, TMZ reported that someone had said “Jennifer Connelly (in the Nineties) was way more attractive than Zendaya is today — and she was considered pretty mid on the hotness scale.” Legions rose to defend the obviously defensible Nineties hotness of Ms. Connelly: A stupid person is no longer a nitwit, but a “midwit”; the undiscerning eye says Jennifer Connelly’s looks are “mid.”

Unlike traditional English slang, which comes from letters to Winston Churchill (“OMG!”) or how American black people talk, now terms bubble up from the weird parts of the internet (see: “cheugy,” “lindy,” “it’s giving,” “based”). The etymology of “mid” goes something like this: in 2012, the pseudonymous blogger Vox Day was angry at how crap the content was on Salon (relatedly, as once-cool Salon is now a shit-festooned barnacle attached to the culture). Vox wrote a piece entitled “The Tragedy of the Mid-Witted,” taking aim at a Salon writer for having observed with surprise that a cocktail waitress could drop author Margaret Atwood’s name and being astonished “that clever people are buried in every nook and cranny of life.”

Taking great exception to the notion that knowing a few Atwood books is a sign of cleverness, Vox went into the high decibels, using population IQ distribution to explain how “those who possess above-average intelligence and trouble to occasionally read newspapers and magazines tend to genuinely be under the erroneous impression that they possess superlative intelligence. But while having an IQ between one and two standard deviations above the norm is unusual, it is hardly rare, and in historical terms it is distinctly pedestrian.

Ah yes, quite pedestrian indeed. Harumph.

From there, it was up to the memesters. According to something called the Meming Wiki, “midwit” has been “in use on 4chan and other online spaces since around 2013.” But it took a graphic format to make it viral. The Midwit meme shows a bell-curve chart, with some idiotic claim in the center next to a picture of the wojak-midwit, and at the extremes — the idiot side and the genius side — the same simple and ultimately wise claim.

There’s real wisdom in the variously attributed observation that the only simplicity to be trusted is “the simplicity to be found on the far side of complexity.” But as a tic of language, it is an awful one. To use “mid” as an insult is to smuggle in a premise about the insulter. Calling something merely average is enough for you, the weird narcissist who goes around including himself in the top decile.

In the era of social media we all seem to have forgotten that the most valuable compliments come from others. Compliments you pay yourself aren’t worth anything at all, of course, you dimwits.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s August 2023 World edition.