Don’t we all sometimes feel a bit “mediocre”? With the Not Top 8th year on a wet Thursday afternoon?
What a creepily vague word! What exactly does it mean? Time for a little pedantry. Pay attention at the back.
It’s from the Middle French “médiocre” or the Latin “mediocris” meaning “ordinary, mean, average, inferior” – or literally “half-way up a mountain”, from “medius”, “middle” and “ocris”, “jagged mountain” (cognate with Greek “okris”).
Okay? Is that you? An old goat stuck half-way up a mountain? Not much cop? Average? Mean? Lacklustre? What a dispiriting appellation! Could it sometimes describe your chums sunk over there on staffroom sofas, burned-out, battered foot soldiers, clapped-out idealists?
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