Homo insipiens
English
Etymology
From Homo sapiens (“the human species”, literally “wise man”), replacing sapiēns (“wise”) with Latin īnsipiēns (“foolish”).
Noun
Homo insipiens (uncountable)
- (rare, derogatory) The humans as a group, seen as a foolish species.
- 1935, The Atlantic, Volume 156, Atlantic Monthly Company, page 8:
- On the contrary, at the moment there seems to have been a slight retrograde movement; man is Homo insipiens. We are hovering on the brink of a precipice, winding round that dizzy path up which we may ultimately reach the peaks of Wisdom, but off which we may so easily topple to destruction.
- 2010, Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Life, Hachette UK, →ISBN, page 201:
- What Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin have called the Sixth Extinction is the one now being perpetrated by Homo sapiens – or Homo insipiens as my old German teacher William Cartwright preferred to say.
- 2016, Antonis Anastasiadis, Crystals II: 2nd Battle of the Titans: Clash between Hypercosmic and the Supernatural (Celestial Battle), AKAKIA Publications, →ISBN, page 315:
- Homo sapiens, lost in his arrogance and avarice, destroys and razes planet Earth, turning himself into Homo insipiens, in fact unshering in the sixth great destruction and extinction of species in present time.
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Synonyms
- Homo idioticus
Related terms
- Homo economicus
- Homo reciprocans
- Homo superior, Homo superioris