plēbēius

Plēbēius comes from plebs (the common people, the masses). The origin of plebs is uncertain — it may be related to the Greek plēthos (multitude, crowd). In early Rome, the plebeians were everyone who was not a patrician — the vast majority of the population. They could not hold high office, could not intermarry with patricians, and were excluded from the priesthoods that controlled the calendar and the law. They were the Roman people minus the Roman elite.

The plebeians organized. Their most powerful weapon was the secessio plebis — the secession of the plebeians, a mass withdrawal from the city that left the patricians without labor, soldiers, or anyone to govern. The First Secession in 494 BCE won the plebeians their own representatives (tribunes) with the power to veto patrician actions. The word for the common people became the foundation of a political institution. The crowd got its own officers.

Plebeian entered English in the sixteenth century, initially as a historical term for Roman social structure. By the seventeenth century, it had become an adjective meaning common, vulgar, unrefined. 'Plebeian tastes,' 'plebeian entertainment,' 'plebeian manners' — the word carried the patrician's contempt built into its etymology. To call something plebeian was to see it from above.

The shortened form 'pleb' became British slang for an ordinary or uncultured person. In 2012, a British Cabinet minister resigned after allegedly calling police officers at the gates of Downing Street 'plebs.' The Roman class division, twenty-five centuries old, was still functional as an insult in twenty-first-century London.