File under “Polloi, Hoi”: There is no English redundancy in the phrase, “the hoi polloi.”
One of my favorite quotes about writing comes from Bil Gilbert, the late Sports Illustrated columnist, who warned writers: “Writing is not glamorous. It is not appearing on The Tonight Show. It is my job. It is sitting in the damn basement, worrying about the word the.”
Note that Bil was not worried about the word hoi.
I seem to read the argument about the phrase hoi polloi more than I read or hear the words in actual use. The persnickitors point out—and correctly so, I fully acknowledge—that literally translated from Greek, hoi polloi means “the many.” So if I speak of “the hoi polloi,” I am actually uttering words meaning “the the many.”
All well and good, but I argue against this particularly technicality for several reasons.
Let’s begin not with grammar but with the sound of the language. The sentence “The choice was popular with hoi polloi,” sounds, to my ear, lacking. If you understand the term, the sentence begs for an English “the.” If you don’t understand the term, and I'd wager that more don’t than do (there’s a reason “It’s all Greek to me” continues to live—for that reason see page 103),
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Bill Brohaugh
the sentence seems to sound as if the choice was popular with someone named Hoi Polloi. (Compare “The choice was popular with baker” and “The choice was popular with the baker.”)
Next, we already assimilate the word the as expressed in various languages into words we use every day. (“The al-Qaeda base”—“the the base base.”) Or, for that matter, several other Arabic borrowings (the “meanings” in parentheses in the following examples represent present spellings, not source spellings): including “the essence” (al-cohol), “the calcined ashes” (al-kali), “the sea eagle” (albatross), and “the early blooming fruit” (al-pricot). Or moving to Spanish, how about “The Las Vegas plain,” which literally means “the the fertile plain plain”; “the alligator,” meaning “the the lizard”; or “the alpaca,” meaning “the the llama.” (I have to admit a certain affection for “the the” preceding the el el spelling of llama.) Let’s let the French into it, too: “the ammunition,” meaning “the the munition.” And my favorite such “redundancy” involves the professional baseball team that began as The Los Angeles Angels. That name translates into “the the angels angels.” (The team moved to Anaheim, calling themselves, of course, the Anaheim Angels, but then, without actually moving a single bat out of its rack, changed its name to the Anaheim Angels of Los Angeles, in essence, “the angels of the angels,” kind of a different creme de la creme.) So why should the phrase hoi polloi have to wear the batross around its neck and not also be granted such assimilation?
Third, as I often point out in this book, we speak English and not [fill in the source language in question here]. And by the precepts of the law of Xtreme Etymological Stasis (XeS), if you’re going to do unto polloi by insisting that hoi be properly interpreted,
why don’t we do unto others in the same way?: “My plane landed at Los Angeles airport,” instead of “My plane landed at the Los Angeles airport.” Better yet, perhaps we should XeS the sentence to read “My plane landed at Hoi Angeles airport.”
Fourth, I find it interesting to note that the Oxford English Dictionary cites seven manuscripts using the phrase hoi polloi over the centuries. Five of the seven references insert English “the” before the phrase. Granted, two references were from learned authors, John Dryden and Lord George Gordon Byron, which would explain the two holdouts. Would, but doesn’t. Both Dryden and Byron use that icky the- word before hoi polloi.
Fifth, I believe the persnickitors should concern themselves not with definite articles, but with indefinite meanings. Hoi polloi is in danger of losing its original meaning of the “the many, the masses” as it becomes associated with hoity-toity, a word with similar sounds and rhythms and a significantly contrary meaning. Although, I might find myself relishing the time when hoity-toity persnickitors have lost their grasp on the general meaning of hoi polloi because they were overly concerned about that rascally the. (And as an aside, I wonder if anyone has ever misinterpreted hoity-toity as “the tytoity.” And such misinterpretation would give interesting new meaning to the Chinese condiment, hoisin, “the sin” sauce, which of course it is not.) The true irony of the shifting meaning of hoi polloi by association with hoity-toity is that hoity-toity has its roots in words basically meaning “rabble-rousing.”
Finally, word use and acceptance is ultimately a matter of democracy (another Greek donation, that). So if the masses—hoi polloi
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with or without the the —want to say “the hoi polloi,” then so be it.
11 Even though I hate footnotes to the point that I continually use them, I want to point out that when said aloud—which happens, um, all the time —hoi polloi sounds like an Australian greeting. “Hoy! Palloy!” Kind of like the down-under version of a Brooklyn “Hey, pally!”
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