mediocrat

Noun

mediocrat (plural mediocrats)

1. A politician or bureaucrat of mediocre ability.
   • 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.1993, Brazil Watch - Volume 10, page 21
   • 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.1995, Rishi Ranjan Chakrabarty, While India is burning, page 38
2. An advocate of mediocracy; one who prefers to avoid controversy, change and risk.
   • 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.1971, John W. Berry, Gerald J. S. Wilde, Social Psychology of Canada: An Annotated Bibliography, page 9
   • Perhaps this Utopia of the mediocrats is not so far off; perhaps it is time for the meritocracy to assert itself.1977, Hans Jürgen Eysenck, Psychology is about people, page 199
3. An ordinary person with no special abilities; a mediocrity.
   • Follow the big top, even if you're only one of the crowd, only a mediocrat, as Vesta says.1928, Nalbro Bartley, The Mediocrat, page 172
   • 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.1971, Elaine Kendall, The Happy Mediocrity, page 196
4. A politician or leader from a middle-class background.
   • 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...1908, Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons, Parliamentary Papers: 1850-1908 - Volume 76, Part 2, page 124
   • 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.1997, Watts Wacker, The 500-year Delta: What Happens After what Comes Next, page 30
5. A plant species that thrives in moderate conditions.
   • 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,1979, Pollen Et Spores, page 159
   • The sharp increase in terminocrats and the decrease in mediocrats between marker beds f and h should correspond to renewed cooling.2004, John A. Van Couvering, The Pleistocene Boundary and the Beginning of the Quaternary