Meaning
A person slow at learning - the classroom insult that has outlived the classroom punishment it came with. Calling someone a dunce is now mild, almost fond, but the word began as a sectarian sneer at one of the Middle Ages' subtlest minds. Mild and usually comic now; the historical irony - the subtle doctor's name for stupidity - is the entry's best lesson. Regional use: General English; eponymous origin.
Origin
The joke is on the scholastics. John Duns Scotus, who died in 1308, was among the most respected philosophers of his age, and his followers, the Dunsmen, defended his learning against the new humanism of the sixteenth century - and lost the argument so thoroughly that their master's name became the word for a fool: the Oxford record dates dunce to 1530, first for the hair-splitting adherents of old learning, then for anyone dim. The insult then acquired its uniform - the pointed dunce cap, the phrase dating from 1791 and depicted in the New England Primer as early as 1727, which Dickens introduced to literature in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840). A legend even held that Scotus himself believed the cone would funnel knowledge into the brain; the schools of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries used it for slow learners until critics from Babcock in 1831 to a 1927 editorial - the rod and the cap were not eminently successful - retired it. Swift had already given the word its permanent afterlife around 1713: that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a real dunce
- dunce cap
- dunces
Usage Examples
- The wiring manual called for a thirty-amp fuse; the previous owner was apparently a dunce.
- Every family keeps one drawer of cables labelled by some dunce in a hurry, usually in permanent pen.
- He played the dunce at school deliberately, right up to the scholarship results were read out.