Doryphore: World Wide Words, Michael Quinion

A pedantic critic of minor errors; a nit-picker.

We owe this word to Sir Harold Nicolson, who introduced it to the world in the Spectator magazine in August 1952. In an issue of the same magazine later the same year, he described a doryphore as a “questing prig, who derives intense satisfaction from pointing out the errors of others.”

A writer in the New Yorker in 1989 described being taken out to lunch one day by the magazine’s editors: “They were rigidly abstemious, lest they fuddle their minds and give hostages to subsequent doryphores on returning to work.” (Your present editor follows a similar regime, with less success.) In 1996, Herb Caen wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle: “For a doryphore, what is more delightful than a mistake in a correction?”

Sir Harold took it from French, in which it’s the usual name for the Colorado beetle, hence a pest. Doryphora was at one time the genus of the potato beetle, though its formal name now is Leptinotarsa decemlineata (decemlineata, ten-lined, in reference to its striped back). The old genus name was taken from Greek doruphoros, a spear-carrier, which echoes a one-time folk name for the insect in the US, the ten-striped spearman. The French presumably acquired their term for it from its old genus name.

As an aside, doryphore was French slang for the occupying German soldiers in World War Two and later became a derogatory term for tourists, much as the locals in Cornwall call them emmets (ants).

PHOTO: Ripped off from Pribek.net nation, and placed unabashedly here because we have now correlated yob with doryphore

World Wide Words is copyright © Michael Quinion, 1996–2008.