Some words are more obscure than others, and are made more so by a variety of spellings. Our first word today fits this category: cackistocracy or kakistocracy. I provide the spellings in that order because my first encounter with the word was in the former spelling, although the latter seems to be both the accepted spelling and the American spelling. The only “cack-” spellings I found were on United Kingdom sites.
My home dictionary (The New World Dictionary of the American Language, Second College Edition, 1980, William Collins Publishers, Inc.) does not contain the word in any spelling. Neither does my main source of etmology (etymonline.com).
The crust hardcore band formed in 1997 took this word as its name. According to answers.com, kakistocracy is a noun that means government by the least qualified or most unprincipled citizens. It comes from the Greek word kakistos, which combines kakos, meaning bad and -cracy meaning government (Wikipedia says kratia, meaning power, rule, government).
My GoodSearch (which benefits Sierra Vista $ .01 each time I use it) found 7147 results for the kakistocracy spelling, including kakistocracy.net which takes you to a photo of President Obama. If you’re upset by that, try kakistocracy.org and click on the “Home” key to find a photo of President Bush. Kakistocracy is what you make of it.
The second word today is plutocracy, which isn’t about animated dogs ruling us. Ploutos in Green means wealth, so a plutocracy is government by the wealthy. There are more than a few people who feel this better describes our government in 2010.
Other –ocracies that are more familiar are bureaucracy, democracy, meritocracy, and autocracy.
New –ocracies are being formed every day with the expansion of cyberocracy. Do-ocracy is growing in use, and is defined as a summary term for consensus management on a non-authoritarian, classical anarchist model emphasizing voluntary involvement and actual results, where those with an actual involvement make the decisions.
For a good list of –ocracies, go to virtuallinguist.typepad.com and read the April 20 blog.
It is interesting that we refer to American governments or forms of democracy by using the –ocracy label, much as we’ve taken since Watergate to refer to government scandals by adding –gate to the subject of the scandal (remember travel-gate in the Clinton presidency?).
The other suffix in use to describe governments is –archy, which is the Greek word for “rule”. Most people know anarchy (the absence of anyone ruling), monarchy (one-person rule), and many know oligarchy (rule by a few).
But when it comes to creating new words, -ocracy has it all over –archy for creativity. Make one yourself. After all, this isn’t a larryarchy.
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