copied right out of my on line American Heritage dictionary (with all due
apologies to the Oxford crowd).....
hoi pol·loi (hoi" p...-loi") n. The common people; the masses. [Greek, the
many : hoi, nominative pl. of ho, the; see so- below + polloi, nominative
pl. of polus, many; see pel...-1 below.]
--------------------
WORD HISTORY: We hoi polloi may want to be careful in our use of the term
hoi polloi because a few pitfalls lie in wait for those without a knowledge
of its background. Hoi polloi is a borrowing of the Greek phrase hoi polloi,
which is made up of the form hoi, meaning "the" and used before a plural,
and polloi, the plural of polus, "many." In Greek hoi polloi had a special
sense, "the greater number, the people, the commonalty, the masses." This is
what the phrase has tended to express in English since its first recorded
instance, in an 1837 work by James Fenimore Cooper. One pitfall in the use
of hoi polloi lies in the fact that hoi already expresses the sense "the,"
so that technically one should not add another the to the phrase, as in the
hoi polloi. But this technicality has not stopped many users of the phrase,
including Cooper, from doing so. The other pitfall in the use of the phrase
is the misuse of it to mean "the elite," possibly brought about because hoi
in the phrase the hoi polloi is reminiscent of high as in high and mighty
and also because hoi polloi may recall hoity-toity.
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