mediocrat

English

Etymology

From medio- +‎ -crat.

Noun

mediocrat (plural mediocrats)

1. A politician or bureaucrat of mediocre ability.
   • 1993, Brazil Watch - Volume 10, page 21:

     The Oligarchs — remnants from Brazil's colonial past — are sub-divided into the well-intentioned but provincial "mediocrats" and the more highly powered "kleptocrats" — thieves of the first order.

   • 1995, Rishi Ranjan Chakrabarty, While India is burning, page 38:

     In India, men and women of talent, ability, honesty and integrity keep their distance from the politics of today. It is a game of mediocrats.

   • 2008, R. P. Mohanty, Quality Management Practices, page 175:

     It was argued by Jayashree (1999) and by Sadri and Jayashree (2002) that the greatest hindrance to organisational progress is the mediocrat - the bureaucrat who tries to guard his turf since he is inherently insecure.

2. An advocate of mediocracy; one who prefers to avoid controversy, change and risk.
   • 1971, John W. Berry, Gerald J. S. Wilde, Social Psychology of Canada: An Annotated Bibliography, page 9:

     There is in Canadian political, business, and social life a certain formality and conservatism that reflect this fact. This conservatism has its regrettable side, of course. The walking dead are out in numbers - the mediocrats, the anti-hothead vote.

   • 1977, Hans Jürgen Eysenck, Psychology is about people, page 199:

     Perhaps this Utopia of the mediocrats is not so far off; perhaps it is time for the meritocracy to assert itself.

   • 1978, Arianna Stassinopoulos Huffington, After Reason, page 153:

     And our mediocrats are satisfied. Mediocrity is not, of course, a specifically modern sin; what is specifically modern is its overwhelming acceptance as the normal condition of humanity.

   • 1997, Dick Higgins, Modernism Since Postmodernism: Essays on Intermedia, page 62:

     First of all, we have to scrap the mediocrats' approach. We have to reward excellence without going to a superstar mentality, and we have to take care that at all times all the possibilities are covered.

3. An ordinary person with no special abilities; a mediocrity.
   • 1928, Nalbro Bartley, The Mediocrat, page 172:

     Follow the big top, even if you're only one of the crowd, only a mediocrat, as Vesta says.

   • 1971, Elaine Kendall, The Happy Mediocrity, page 196:

     Not only is marriage a prerequisite for these groups, but in all other respects the joiners sound like archetypical mediocrats. Their average income is about $10,000 a year; the most heavily represented occupational categories are “salesman” and "housewife," and the average age is thirty to fifty.

   • 1995, Ratnakar Gedam, Poverty in India: Myth and Reality, page 489:

     The world evolution is out of mediocrats. You cannot expect all to be Nobel Prize winners or scientists of the rank of Newton.

4. A politician or leader from a middle-class background.
   • 1908, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers: 1850-1908 - Volume 76, Part 2, page 124:

     A Council like this, constituted as it will be exclusively of the ruling chiefs and territorial magnates, will be a mere ornamental body, hardly competent to give sound advice to Government in all important matters. In India it is the mediocrat who have received the light of education, and it is they whou can render good advice for the solution of the important political problems that may arise in the administration of this country.

   • 1997, Watts Wacker, The 500-year Delta: What Happens After what Comes Next, page 30:

     Increasingly, it is through these media-anointed mediocrats — Reverend Al Sharpton for New York's black dispossessed microculture, to cite one example — that microcultures talk to one another.

5. (biology) A plant species that thrives in moderate conditions.
   • 1979, Pollen Et Spores, page 159:

     In our opinion it is impossible to consider Taxodiaceae as a characteristic index of a warm climate and therefore they cannot be included in the typical mediocrats group,

   • 2004, John A. Van Couvering, The Pleistocene Boundary and the Beginning of the Quaternary:

     The sharp increase in terminocrats and the decrease in mediocrats between marker beds f and h should correspond to renewed cooling.

   • 2007, Alfred Traverse, Paleopalynology, page 444:

     The mediocrats (see “mesocratic” in Figure 15.8) curve refers to Quercus, Tilia, Ulmus, and other trees/shrubs characteristic of the climatic-optimum part of interglacials.

Anagrams

• decimator, macrotide, medicator, mercadito