What's ordinary about an Ordinary Fellow?

If you are a native speaker of English it may seem a bit odd to you that I admit to being an Ordinary Fellow of Wolfson College; after all, everyone is a bit extraordinary in some way or another. The truth is that ordinary is one of those words which sometimes seems to stand its meaning on that meaning's head.

By now the word standard, especially in international English, has come to mean not particularly good in any way. If you wanted to say that something was good, you would want to be able to say that it was better than merely standard. Indeed the standard size of (say) soap powder packet is quite likely the smallest one; the standard model of some gadget is the one with none of the features that command a higher price. Why then would the really rather grand Standard Oil Company of New Jersey have chosen such a self-deprecating name? Of course they did not; the word standard used to, and still sometimes does mean good enough to come up to a standard. The corresponding word in Welsh, safonol, is high praise indeed; but then the Welsh language has suffered much less than English at the hands of advertising agencies.

You have to be careful sometimes exactly what is being qualified; which would be better: something general or something special? Ah, but what about Einstein's famous theories of relativity? The special theory explains only what happens in certain special circumstances; whereas the general theory, having more general applicability, explains a great deal more. (Mathematicians will recognise this as an example of contravariance; have you thought of becoming a mathematician?)

There is a sense of ordinary preserved in a handful of contexts in British English which conveys that an office is held by immediate right, and not as a deputy for someone else. When the Anglican church talks about an Ordinary that means the bishop of the diocese, or the archbishop of the province. The royal family's physician in ordinary is the permanent one, not somebody who has been called in an emergency, to dislodge a common fishbone from a royal gullet.

I assure you, an Ordinary Fellow is what one would want to be; for what are the alternatives? The other sorts of fellows are indeed all very special, but they are special in peculiar sorts of ways, such as being retired, or being exceptionally distinguished people that we as a College are proud to regard as our friends, or being (say) junior research fellows. (Ah, now, one of the things on which Wolfson College can rightly congratulate itself is that it elects a disproportionate number of people to various sorts of research fellowship, and so gives a college home to many young post-graduate researchers; have you thought of becoming a young post-graduate researcher?)

But ordinary is the thing to aspire to be. No, really. It is.