Meaning
A brilliant, precociously accomplished young person - the expert who is suspiciously young, arrives in a group, and reorganizes everything before anyone has finished objecting. The phrase flatters and worries in the same breath. Half admiring, half wary - the phrase remembers that brilliance in groups reshapes whatever it joins; the quiz kid is its older broadcast cousin. Regional use: General English; American corporate origin.
Origin
The original Whiz Kids were ten United States Army Air Forces veterans of Statistical Control, the wartime unit that ran operational and logistical data, hired as a bloc by Ford in 1946: their commanding officer Charles Tex Thornton pitched the group to industry as all ten or nothing, and Henry Ford II, newly in charge of the foundering company, took the deal. They brought statistical management control to Dearborn, rebuilt recruitment and training, and placed seven of the ten in senior management - with Robert McNamara rising to the presidency of Ford itself, then the Secretary of Defense, where his inherited team of analysts took the Whiz Kids name into the Pentagon and the era's ambivalence about cleverness. The general phrase soon escaped the company: a brilliant or accomplished young person, in Wiktionary's standing definition, with spellings from whizkid to whizz kid, and a 2018 novel could use it of a copywriter without a syllable of explanation.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a whizz kid
- the whiz kids
Usage Examples
- The university hired three whiz kids straight from the robotics lab and gave them the whole basement.
- Every fintech whiz kid rediscovers, by year three, why the compliance department existed.
- She was the whiz kid of the actuarial floor until the examiners asked to see the model.