Somewhere in the last few years, a two-word phrase crossed over from the clinic into the conversation. It used to live in test reports and psychology journals. Now it turns up in press briefings, social media posts, and the particular kind of political commentary that mistakes contempt for argument. The phrase is “low IQ.” And before we go any further, it is worth asking what IQ actually measures.

IQ stands for Intelligence Quotient. It is a number produced by a standardised test. The average score is 100. Most people sit between 85 and 115. Above 130 is considered exceptional.

The test was invented in France in the early 1900s by a psychologist named Alfred Binet. His original goal was modest and genuinely kind: to identify children who needed extra support in school. A welfare instrument. It was not designed to rank human worth. That application came later, courtesy of everyone who found ranking irresistible.

The Giga Society publishes a list of the highest verified IQs on record. The 2025 report makes for interesting reading. YoungHoon Kim leads at 276. Terence Tao, who won the Fields Medal and became a professor at UCLA at 24, comes in at 230.

Garry Kasparov, who held the chess world championship for over a decade and once made IBM’s supercomputer look nervous, closes the top ten at 190. These are extraordinary human beings, and the list is worth a few minutes of anyone’s time.

Then there is Christopher Langan, IQ 195, who spent years working as a bouncer. And Richard Rosner, IQ 192, who worked as a stripper before writing for late-night television. Genius and a stable career, it turns out, are not the same destination. Which tells you something important about what IQ actually measures, and what it quietly leaves out.

I have not taken the test. My IQ is therefore unverified, which places me in excellent company, since most people deploying the phrase “low IQ” have not taken it either.

This is the thing worth noticing. When someone reaches for those two words to dismiss another person, they are not citing a score. They are borrowing the authority of a number they do not possess, to settle an argument they cannot win on other terms. It is credential theft, performed in public, and repeated often enough that the audience has started to find it normal.

The phrase has migrated from the clinic to the commentary box, and in transit it lost the one thing that gave it any meaning: the actual test.

Alfred Binet spent years building a tool to make sure struggling children did not get left behind. He would have been puzzled to see it turned into a put-down. Though watching the crowd cheer every time it lands, I think he would have found the response more diagnostic than the test.