Weird words: Mattoid

3. Weird Words: Mattoid
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Semi-insane.

That’s the definition given by its inventor, the nineteenth-century
Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso. He believed that criminality
was inherited and that a criminal was born with physical defects
identifying him as a degenerate human being, an atavism. He created
“mattoid” from the Italian “matto”, insane, plus the ending “-oid”
for some likeness or resemblance (from Greek “eidos”, form). He
used it for what psychiatrists call “borderline dwellers”, those
who exist on the margins between reason and madness – in everyday
speech we might call them cranks, eccentrics, or misfits.

The word came into English in 1891 through a translation of his
work Man of Genius and became popular for a while. 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 scientists make a direct and disastrous attack upon
the latent self-respect of criminals.”

from: World Wide Worlds. Thanks Al.