It was just an ordinary moment on an ordinary morning bike ride. With ordinary birds chirping their songs and flitting about as they ordinarily do. With ordinary gravel crunching under my tires like a bowl of Grape Nuts. With ordinary sunshine streaming through the ordinary canopy of trees overhead and dappling the trail as it stretched out in front of me in a way that was exceedingly ordinary.
It was a moment so ordinary, average and mediocre it was, well, perfect.
Since when did mediocrity get a bad rap?
The word mediocre comes from the Latin medial and ocris, which literally translates to “middle mountain.” As one etymological source pointed out, the middle of a mountain is neither up nor down and neither here nor there. It’s somewhere in between. Comme çi, comme ça.
But here’s the amazing thing about mediocrity. It has perservered for over four centuries of continual use, not once wavering from its original intent.
Merriam Webster cites its earliest known evidence in a writing handbook from the 1500s called The English Secretorie, which incidentally went on to become the most influential correspondence manual of its time. “Mediocre,” the book points out, “is a mean betwixt high and low, vehement and slender, too much and too little as we saye …”
And there you have it. Good ol’ mediocre has held its middle ground like a champion — without once expecting a trophy for the feat.
Yet somewhere along the way, the ambiguous middle of the mountain took on the negative distinction of being not quite good enough. It started the day full of caffeine and high expectations, but somewhere betwixt breakfast and lunch, it dissolved into its ordinary, average, mediocre self, just like the rest of us.
I think mediocrity is underrated. The Australians have a saying that the tallest poppy gets its head cut off. Maintaining the status quo? Now that’s an achievement that makes us truly human. Like the flawlessly filtered Instagram influencer you meet in real life only to discover she has a wine belly and a huge zit on her chin. Stars — they’re just like us! Mediocre poppies for the win.
There’s a feminist slogan that urges women to “Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.” As Washington Post columnist Petula Dvorak pointed out, that kind of mediocrity may be at the root of the recent congressional altercation between Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.).
“I think your fake eyelashes are messing up what you’re reading,” Greene told Crockett during a meeting by the House Oversight Committee. Crockett eventually lashed back, so to speak — after an hour of chaos on the floor — calling out Greene’s “bleach-blonde, bad-built butch body.”
To me, it felt more like a cringey showdown on the “Real Housewives” — minus the table-flipping — than a congressional exchange. Women in actual power should do better, I thought. When they go low, we go high, as Michelle Obama pointed out. Lift your sister and all that.
But Dvorak asserted this was no ordinary catfight. She said Reps. Greene and Crockett were merely carrying on as centuries of men in Congress have. To paraphrase Groucho Marx, congressmen resemble those remarks. She cited a 1902 debate when two South Carolina senators got into a fistfight that turned into a full-on barroom brawl. More recently, the time Rep. James Comer (R-Ky.) told Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) he looked “like a Smurf.” And those are just two examples.
“Isn’t it time to acknowledge that saying that true equality is reached when women can be as mediocre (or combative, or flawed, or inexperienced) as men and still succeed and lead?” Dvorak said.
She echoed another sentiment from Michelle Obama, delivered in a speech at the United State of Women Summit in 2018: “I wish that girls could fail as bad as men do and be OK.”
And maybe that’s the point. In a world where we’re all striving for the top, we can actually rise even higher by steadfastly occupying the middle of the mountain. After all, mediocrity is only fair.