mattoid

Etymology

From Italian matto (“insane”) + -oid (“likeness or resemblance”), from Ancient Greek εἶδος (eîdos, “form”) more First appeared in English in 1891 through a translation of the nineteenth-century Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso's work, Man of Genius. H G Wells used it in several of his books, most notably in Mankind in the Making of 1903, in which he derides the theories of Lombroso and the Victorian phrenologists: “Among such theorists none at present are in quite such urgent need of polemical suppression as those who would persuade the heedless general reader that every social failure is necessarily a ‘degenerate’, and who claim boldly that they can trace a distinctly evil and mischievous strain in that unfortunate miscellany which constitutes ‘the criminal class’... These mattoid sc

mattoid means displaying erratic behaviour. Lexicurio rates it Sui generis — a strength score of 87 out of 100.

Why this word is great

MATTOID — [Adjective, Noun] Displaying erratic or eccentric behaviour; historically, a person classified as congenitally abnormal, a degenerate type in 19th-century criminal anthropology. From Italian matto ("insane, mad") + -oid ("likeness or resemblance"), the latter from Ancient Greek εἶδος (eîdos, "form, appearance"). Unlike eccentric, which suggests a harmless, willful oddity, or lunatic, a broad, archaic term for derangement, mattoid is a discredited clinical label, implying a pathological degeneracy that is almost, but not quite, certifiably mad. It is the obsessive scribbling of manifestos in a rented room, the feverish glint in a theorist's eye as he measures a skull, and the meticulously unsound architecture of a garden folly—a word that confesses our dread of the mind poised at the crumbling edge of reason, where genius and defect were once thought to merge.

adj

Displaying erratic behaviour

noun

A person who displays such behaviour; a person of congenitally abnormal mind bordering on insanity or degeneracy.