Stupid

I confess to a lifetime of misunderstanding the word stupid. To me, as a teacher, ‘stupid’ was a derogatory term that seemed to imply not so much a person’s lack of intelligence as much as the apparent unwillingness of the person to use their intelligence or their apparent unthinking and complacent residence in ignorance.
 
In contrast, I learned to my surprise that the word stupid is not related to intelligence or lack of intelligence at all. Rather, the word stupid has its origins in the PIE root (s)teu-1 (to push, stick, knock, beat) and PIE stupe (hit); i.e., to be stupid was to be struck senseless, to be in a stupor.
 
From this PIE root comes Latin stupere (to be stunned, amazed, confounded) and stupidus (amazed, confounded; dull, foolish). The word stupid (mentally slow, lacking ordinary activity of mind, dull, inane) only came to English in the 1540s. 1
 
Today, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines stupid using words such as obtuse, brutish, torpid, senseless, vexatious, and exasperating.
 
I recently came across a short six-minute video based on part of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s book, Letters and papers from prison, which helped me put stupidity in a larger context. In brief, Bonhoeffer suggests that stupidity in its darkest forms is not so much an intellectual defect as a moral defect and that stupidity is not so much a psychological problem as a sociological problem. A stupid person is not only undisturbed by facts or reason or appeals to emotion but, more seriously, a stupid person cannot tell the difference between good and evil and, as such, is a danger to themself and to others. 2
 
Reference: Online Etymological Dictionary, https://www.etymonline.com/
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/stupid

1 Note that this was the time of the Protestant Reformation in Western Europe. Perhaps, at this time, people were considered ‘stupid’ who did not believe the same things that you believed.
 
2 Bonhoeffer’s theory of stupidity (six-minute video)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww47bR86wSc&ab_channel=Sprouts