Cowardice?
One thing that really, really irritates me is the misuse of the word cowardice. As an example, the Boston Globe has an article about a guy who attacked an officer writing a traffic ticket."This is just another alarming case of cowardice on behalf of somebody who chose to park illegally, and couldn't deal with the consequences," Tinlin said. "nobody likes to get a parking ticket, but when it reaches the level as extreme as this and couple of other occasions in the past, when things escalate from the verbal to the physical, you have a real problem."Princeton's WordNet defines cowardice as "the trait of lacking courage". What on earth does this situation have to do with lacking courage? Does it now take courage to accept a parking ticket?
In my mind, there have been other serious misuses of the word over the last few years, but I'll leave it up to you to come up with them yourselves.
posted by Paul Wilczynski @ 7:49 AM
3 Comments:
I blame C.S. Lewis for this one. He wrote in "the Screwtape letters" that cowardice was the one human vice that we can't truly glamorize. All the time, people who are lustful, or angry or selfish whatever can be made to seem cool because of it, but cowardice is just inherently unattractive.
CC
Paul: Are you too cowardly to revisit Bill Maher's territory here? :)
Hey, Maher got in lots of trouble about that! I'd be afraid someone would take my blog away from me :)
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