Hoi Polloi Or Hoity-Toity?


Because I’m a college composition instructor, I’m interested in the way words and phrases connote certain meanings. I’ve noticed that connotations sometimes reflect speakers’ or writers’ stations in life, especially if they are Hoi Polloi — a Greek term referring to “the many,” i.e., the common people — or Hoity-Toity, an adjective used to describe those who would have others believe they are elite and enlightened.

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Hoi Polloi vernacular communicates its intended meaning without regard to listeners’ comfort zones, self-esteem or sensibilities. A good example is the bumper sticker on the pickup owned by my Uncle Larry, an Italian farmer: “You toucha my truck, I breaka you face.” No gray area there.
  The opposite of this form of communication is that used by Hoity-Toity wannabe nobility, sometimes including those with alternative sexual orientations (pejoratively called fops, # and fairies by hostile Hoi Polloi). They filter their fanciful phraseology through the prim and proper parameters of political correctness, which often connotes a meaning totally different from the original, and is often so effete and inoffensive that the intended message asphyxiates in a vacuum of vapid verbiage. 
  My college students, molded in public educational systems that strive to alter plain, straightforward, unambiguous communication and thereby render Hoi Polloi extinct, insist there is no loss of meaning or reduction in efficient grammar and syntax when they express themselves in the politically correct lexicon. To them, the following memo would contain no excess verbiage or loss of intended meaning: “Each and every student must report to his or her teacher when he or she arrives in order to obtain his or her grades, or else he or she will be obligated to compute his or her average for himself or herself.” 
  Obfuscating word connotation helps refined individuals disguise lies in doublespeak, an advantage especially useful to any of America’s leaders who tend to lean toward a more socialistic form of government. Without constraint, they would be able to use catchword terminology like “fairness” as in “The Fairness Doctrine” to assure the philistine Hoi Polloi that there is nothing unfair about censoring conservative newspaper columnists and radio talk show hosts; or “affirmative” as in “Affirmative Action” to assure them that skin color, intellectual quotient, or socioeconomic circumstances notwithstanding, university administrators must view all potential enrollees with the same benevolent degree of affirmativeness. If such elite, enlightened rulers ever became become dominant policy makers, they could implement innovative ideologies that would usher in universal equalization of the ruled. Progressive policies, infused with multiculturalism and diversity, would make all previous societal stratifications, stigmas, polarities, and parochial barriers — real and imagined — artifacts of what such leaders would refer to as a dark, oppressive era in this nation’s history, an era when competition determined outcome instead of concession, appeasement, compromise, fairness, and affirmative action. In such an enlightened, anti-capitalistic New Age, a citizen would be able to interact with peers in a sort of Kumbhaya global village without ever having to wonder … is he or she Hoi Polloi or Hoity-Toity?