idiocracy

Today’s Zippy, ripe with pop culture references and the libfix -cracy in idiocracy ‘government or rule by idiots’:

The reference is to the film Idiocracy. As Wikipedia has it:

Idiocracy is a 2006 American satirical science fiction comedy, directed by Mike Judge and starring Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph and Dax Shepard.

The film tells the story of two ordinary people who are taken into a top-secret military hibernation experiment that goes awry, and awaken 500 years in the future. They discover that the world has degenerated into a dystopia where advertising, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society devoid of intellectual curiosity, social responsibility and coherent notions of justice and human rights.

The poster for the film:

and the DVD cover:

Plus a notable quote:

The film has attracted other cartoonists, as here.

And xkcd:

4 Responses to “idiocracy”

  1. Bobo Linq Says:

    Do I spy an eggcorn — “ripe” for “rife”?

    • arnold zwicky Says:

      It is indeed in the ecdb, here, entered by me in fact. But I liked the imagery of ripe, and chose it intentionally. In fact, OED3 (June 2010) has an entry for ripe with ‘full of; amply endowed with’, with cites from 1579 through 2005.

      You can get to ripe with by choosing it for its imagery, or by trying for the idiom rife with and eggcorning it.

  2. Inventory of libfix postings « Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:

    […] AZBlog, 5/5/11: idiocracy (link) […]

  3. mooch(er)- words « Arnold Zwicky's Blog Says:

    […] On -(o)cracy words, prompted by idiocracy, see here. […]

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