Outlier, according to Malcolm Gladwell

Malcolm Gladwell popularised the phrase,"tipping point". Now, another word may become fashionable because of him: "outlier".

He is not using it in the statistical sense in which it has begun to show up in American election news. A Newsweek poll giving Barack Obama a 15-point lead over John McCain, for example, was described as "outlier" for being out of line with the other polls, which indicated a closer contest. That is what the word means in statistics: a figure much higher or lower than the rest, or -- as the Free Dictionary says -- an extreme deviation from the mean.

Gladwell uses the word in another sense. "Outlier" means extraordinary in his new book, Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't.

The book, which will be out in November, in time for the US elections, is about extraordinary people.

This is how it is described on Amazon.com, which is already taking orders for the book:

In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of "outliers"--the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.

One can understand why Gladwell calls them "outliers": they are a cut above the rest. But how many of us would have come up with that particular word to describe them? This is what sets apart good writers: their ability to come up with something fresh. 

The word itself is not new. It goes back to the 17th century and has other meanings too. According to Dictionary.com, "outlier" means:

1.    a person or thing that lies outside.
2.    a person residing outside the place of his or her business, duty, etc.
3.    Geology. a part of a formation left detached through the removal of surrounding parts by erosion.

Interestingly, the word hardly appears in British newspapers. I did a Google search and couldn't find it ever being used in the Guardian or The Times. All the links were to American and Canadian newspapers.

Now, used by a bestselling author like Gladwell, the word is bound to spread.  The New York Times had a piece on the book yesterday.