That's what I mean, it never meant idiot until people misinterpreted Bugs and assigned their own meaning to it.
I spent more time on this than I should have but according to a few sources I've found it's a little more complicated. tl;dr: Nimrod was used as an insult, probably sarcastically to describe a bad hunter, from the 19th century, but the cartoon popularized that usage.
Here's the relevant portion of a Columbia Journalism Review Article:
https://www.cjr.org/language_corner/nimrod_nabob_mogul.php#:~:text=Here's Merriam-Webster's explanation of,' ”
A letter to an advice columnist recently complained that a son’s school was treating his parents “like nimrods.” In context, it was clear that the letter writers meant “idiots.” But “nimrod” used to be a positive word, not a negative one.
Yes, it’s time for “when good words go bad.”
For many years, centuries even, “nimrod” meant “a hunter,” perhaps even a great one. In the Bible, Nimrod, a descendant of Ham, was portrayed as “a mighty hunter before the Lord.” As the
Merriam-Webster Dictionary notes, “It’s easy to see how people made the leap from one mighty hunter in the Bible to calling any hunter a
nimrod.”
So how did he get to be an idiot?
Nimrod was a king of Shinar, what we know more familiarly as Mesopotamia. Interestingly enough, the Mesopotamians had a war god whose name was Nintura, who was
also known as a mighty hunter. Coincidence? Not to
The Oxford English Dictionary, which says that Nintura begat Nimrod, etymologically speaking, and that “Nimrod” translates from the Hebrew to “we will rebel.” Turns out that neither Nintura nor Nimrod were particularly benevolent, and the first non-capitalized use of “nimrod” was “tyrant.” That usage is now obsolete. (But hold on to that thought.)
Um, “idiot”?
We’re getting there.
Here’s
Merriam-Webster’s explanation of the transformation: “The legendary Nimrod is also sometimes associated with the attempt to build the Tower of Babel. Because the tower resulted in the wrath of the Lord and proved a disastrous idea,
nimrod is sometimes used with yet another meaning: ‘a stupid person.’ ”
But Bryan A. Garner blames Bugs Bunny. As he wrote in “The Ongoing Tumult in English Usage,” an essay in
Garner’s Modern English Usage, Bugs used “nimrod” to taunt his nemesis Elmer Fudd (a hunter, no coincidence):
“What a moron! [pronounced like maroon] What a nimrod! [pronounced with a pause like two words, nim rod].” So for an entire generation raised on these cartoons, the word took on the sense of ineptitude—and therefore what was originally a good joke got ruined.
However, the
OED says that “nimrod” has been used ironically for many years to mean a hunter who is maybe not-so-great. And it traces the North American slang “nimrod,” meaning “a stupid or contemptible person; an idiot” to 1933, before Bugs munched his first carrot.
That's more or less what Wikipedia says, too. Basically it was either used sarcastically to describe a bad hunter or because Nimrod was connected in some stories the the Tower of Babel story, which did not end well for him.
There are a couple of sources I found that do connect Looney Tunes and the "idiot" meaning, and from what I've read it looks like the cartoons popularized that usage at the very least.