Word of the Day -- Barbarian

Ah, the barbarian.  One of my favorite words.  Who doesn't know Conan the Barbarian, or who hasn't heard the line: "The Barbarians are at the gate!" It's from a book about the fall of RJR Nabisco, but it's been around in the lexicon for much longer than that.  It started out as a word to signify anyone from "away" as we often say here in Maine.  (Where do they live? Oh, they are from away...) to signify anyone from a foreign land, or just simply somewhere else.  The Greeks came up with the term around the 14th century as an antonym to politis meaning citizen, and thereby civilized.  Thus the word became used to signify anyone that was not a citizen, someone foreign.  And because we are, by nature, predisposed to be ethnocentric, anyone from another country must be inferior to us, so barbarians are thought to be inferior.  The Greeks first used the term to refer to the Persian empire but the word has gone, from simply being used to describe someone from another country, to describing people from neighboring towns, and indeed people use it to describe their family.  However, the best maxim to take away from this is: "One man's barbarian is another man's mother"  Though you may think someone is a barbarian, they may be thinking the same thing about you. :-)