Things fall apart.

Dear Word Detective: The common people or “hoy polloy” (hoi polloi) — what is its derivation? — Gary Southmayd.

Where did the common people come from? Beats me. Somebody left the door open, I guess. My question is how they all apparently got driver’s licenses without putting down their cell phones to sign the forms.

Onward. Presuming you meant “Where did the phrase ‘hoi polloi’ come from?” the answer is easy. “Hoi polloi” is Greek for “the many,” and has been used to mean “the masses of common people” in English since the 19th century. (It actually showed up in English prose as far back as 1668, but at that point it was written in Greek characters, so it wasn’t considered an English term.)

“Hoi polloi” is one of those terms, like “rabble” or “mob,” that embodies an implicitly derogatory social attitude. At the time it appeared in English, a classical education, which usually included instruction in Greek, was the province of only the wealthy. Early uses of the term (”The hoi polloi …, as we say at Oxford, are mindless — all blank,” 1855) take a palpable pleasure in the double-whammy of denigrating the “unwashed masses” with a term “the rabble” themselves were presumed incapable of understanding. This in-joke quality of “hoi polloi” has, however, faded over the intervening centuries, and today the term is almost always used in a sarcastic or ironic sense (”Prison gave Martha Stewart the opportunity to hobnob with the hoi polloi”).

There are three odd aspects to the recent history of “hoi polloi” worth mentioning. First, some “language experts” have made tiny careers out of objecting to the usual form “the hoi polloi” on the grounds that “hoi” is Greek for “the,” making “the hoi polloi” equivalent to saying “the the many.” This objection is simply silly. “Hoi polloi” is now part of the English language as a fixed phrase, and we say “the hoi polloi” for the same reason we say “the alligator” (from the Spanish “el lagarto,” meaning “the lizard”) without worrying about that phantom “the.”

A bit stranger is the fact that, at least in some folks’ minds, “hoi polloi” flipped its meaning in the mid-20th century, and they began using it to mean “the wealthy, the elite.” It’s unclear why this happened, but I suspect it was because of a mistaken association of the “hoi” with “hoity-toity.” This use should be avoided unless you’re trying to confuse people.

Lastly, a correspondent on the American Dialect Society mailing list recently pointed to Ray Ratto, a columnist in the San Francisco Chronicle, splitting the phrase and using “hoi” to mean “the elite” and “polloi” to mean “underlings” (”… but as he spends more time with the hoi and less with the polloi, …”). This is just plain weird, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see it spread.