[Ads-l] Antedating of "Superiority Complex"

[Chris Waigl]

This is a slightly odd one. Often with terms like these - psychologizing,
or from economics or another social science (or even natural science) - the
basically same term (modulo calque) pops up pretty much simultaneously in
English, German, French (and probably other European languages). I have put
a mental pin in this phenomenon because I don't completely understand the
mechanism.

Be that as it may, this one's a little different. First of all, in German,
Überlegenheitskomplex really really doesn't drip easily off the tongue. But
its opposite, Minderwertigkeitskomplex (inferiority complex), does. As for
the German translation, I first thought I should go with Größenwahn, with a
first cite in DWDS from 1873. But looking at examples, it's really closer
to its direct counterpart in English, megalomania. The dictionaries offer
Überlegenheitskomplex and Überlegenheitsgefühl as translations for
superiority complex, and even though Überlegenheitsgefühl translates
to *feeling
*of superiority, it's used in a more psychologizing flavor in German
compared to English, probably because English more easily can go to to
superiority complex. (The DWDS base corpus has one single cite for
Überlegenheitskomplex, from 1965, but 23 for Überlegenheitsgefühl, starting
in 1903.)

Among the DWDS cites for Überlegenheitsgefühl the second, from 1909, has
the psychologizing flavor that's present in superiority complex. "Indem man
sich an einen festen Standpunkt bindet, schafft man sich
Überlegenheitsgefühle und eine Quelle scheinbarer Kraft, welche den Mangel
an Persönlichkeit ersetzt." (Talks about how a feeling of superiority
replaces a lack of personality.) The first cite for
Minderwertigkeitskomplex is from 1920.

(I certainly grew up with a lot of cultural signaling that having an
inferiority complex was a particularly heinous character flaw, while people
much more rarely talked about a superiority complex in particularly
critical terms - and if they did they'd have used Größenwahn.)

Just musing along here,

Chris

On Mon, Jun 24, 2024 at 6:15 AM Shapiro, Fred <fred.shapiro at yale.edu> wrote:

> superiority complex (OED 1921)
>
> 1920 _Education for the New Era_ 1: 109 (Google Books)
>
> In some measure they are prejudiced by their own vanity, their own
> "superiority complex."
>
> Fred Shapiro
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>


-- 
Chris Waigl . chris.waigl at gmail.com . chris at lascribe.net
http://eggcorns.lascribe.net . http://chryss.eu

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org