I was looking for modern uses of the word stigma and I came across this one in an NPR story from a few years ago about an AIDS conference:

“One of the main barriers to treatment is the stigma that HIV carries. It keeps people from getting tested and allows the virus to continue to spread.”

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From this use it is easy to draw the meaning of the word stigma, as The New Oxford American Dictionary puts it “a mark of disgrace associated with a particular circumstance.”

They give examples of “the stigma of mental disorder” or a “social stigma” associated with being a nonreader.

Etymologically that definition “a mark of disgrace” is right on because originally in English stigma meant “a mark made upon the skin by burning with a hot iron … as a token of infamy or subjection.”

That’s from the OED.

So people who were convicted of crimes or who were slaves were branded, sometimes on their face, to show their social status. This meaning emerged about 400 years ago and very quickly, within a few decades, was being used metaphorically as we use stigma today.

The appearance of the literal “branding” word that appeared in the late 16^th century was drawn from Latin and the Latin word was in turn drawn from Greek, so people have been setting social markings on each other—literally and figuratively—for a very long time.

The Greek word didn’t so much mean “brand” with a hot iron. It could just as easily have been applied to a tattoo because the root of the word stigma is similar to that of the word stick and this is because the marks put on peoples skin in the style of a tattoo are done with a sharp needle that is stuck into the skin. This word root goes all the way back to Indo-European where steig is thought to have meant “to stick” or “sharp.”

You likely already knew that there is a part of flowers called the sigma as well (although before I looked it up I wasn’t exactly sure which part it was). A flower’s stigma is the place where it receives the pollen it needs to go to seed. This part of the flower was named in the early 18^th century and from what I can see it was so named because it represents a pinhole.

So although the meaning of stigma in these two cases is quite different, the word roots are the same.

You’ve heard the old pun my karma ran over your dogma?

I was interested to see that in 1924 a British historian named Philip Guedalla had enough karma to give us another pun just as good.

He said that any stigma is good enough to beat a dogma with.

All I can say is too bad it’s always the dogma that gets the short end of the stigma.