Then I’ll make the distinction more clear: hypocrites lie. They’re playing for the crowd. That’s what the word means: hypokrites, a stage actor. Failing to live up to one’s own standards is not hypocrisy, it’s just failure. Intent matters.
Bricker has it correct in the OP. 100%.
emack, in your post you are continuing what prompted the OP: you are imputing your own interpretation of a well known phrase with a nonspecific meaning. Had the gambler railed against the evils of gambling, then been caught at the craps table, he would be a hypocrite.
Whoosh
I agree with Ravenman. In this instance, your statement was correct or it was not. If you say you adhere to this, and you don’t, you’re a liar. But that doesn’t mean that the argument that “position A is best” is right or wrong.
But we’d conclude the same thing if someone who hadn’t made that claim, but tried prayer to “turn away,” failed, even though that person isn’t a hypocrite. The claim is true or false, regardless of whether or not the speaker is a hypocrite (or even if he believes it at all).
BTW, I agree with your OP. It’s often a misused term.
Yeah, like applying it to the US Congress, regardless of which party is in the majority;)
What the word hypocrisy means to me is:
Someone has a certain set of values. He truly believes in them. He practices something different, because he also truly believes that he is somehow an exception to his own rules.
Note that this does NOT make someone a hypocrite because he fails to live up to his own values, unless he believes he doesn’t have to, but you do. If he fails, and acknowledges (at least to himself) that it is a failure, he may look like a hypocrite, but he isn’t actually one. It’s also not about stated values, but rather, actual values. A TV preacher who isn’t even actually Christian, but is just putting on a show for the money, isn’t being hypocritical when he bangs prostitutes and snorts coke, he’s being a “giant douche”. Someone who believes profits are evil, while raking in money at his business “because I’m special and God wants me to be wealthy” is a hypocrite.
Basically, what it comes down to is that only God can truly judge if someone is a hypocrite. We can, of course, call someone a hypocrite when he looks like one, and that would be perfectly legitimate, and the burden would be on the “hypocrite” to convince us he’s really not. But ultimately, we have no way of knowing what’s truly in the guy’s heart, so we have no way of knowing for sure that he is actually a hypocrite.
You could reasonably say that being hypocritical is also being a “giant douche”. They are not mutually exclusive. So in my book, a hypocrite is always a “giant douche”, but a “giant douche” isn’t neccesarilly also a hypocrite.
Thanks, emacknight, for the “giant douche” term. It fits perfectly with what I’m trying to say.
I have also seen “hippocracy”, which would mean “government by horses”, when we all know that it is only their hindquarters that are engaged in governing! 
Then you got “hippycracy”, people who claim peace and love, but secretly practice the deadly arts of tai chi.
Interesting. I know a person who is philosophically opposed to the Federal grant-and-loan implementation of Affirmative Action – either meet a specific quota of employment and/or subcontracting to minorities or WBE/MBE firms, or affirmatively demonstrate why it was impossible to do so (e.g, “only one such firm performs any of the services underwritten by the grant/loan, and they were booked up, unable to undertake a contract within the time frame needed.”) [He believes in the principle of Affirmative Action, that minorities should receive fair and equal share in hiring and subcontracting, but not in the mandative quota system.]
However, when he is preparing or administering a grant or loan for a client, he feels it is his fiduciary duty to avail them of the benefits of meeting the Affirmative Action quota system that is in place, keeping them competitive in the jockeying for such grants or loans, since others are in fact doing so.
Do you see his stance as hypocritical? I frankly do not – but I can see how one could argue it is.
Does anyone remember back when Bill Clinton said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
Then the cum stained dress showed up and it was proven that he got a blow job from her.
So did Clinton lie under oath, and thus commit perjury?
Or are we “imputing our own interpretation of a well known phrase with a nonspecific meaning.”
Clinton later said he didn’t think “sexual relations” included blow jobs, but Ken Star and Congress disagreed.
So it seems a hypocrite is a person that acts contrary to his expressed beliefs.
And a giant douche is a hypocrite that then lawyers up, gets a publicist, and tries to redefine what his expressed beliefs were to match the actions we caught him performing.
There are so many things wrong with the facts claimed in this post I hardly know where to begin.
Yes, Clinton famously said, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.” But he wasn’t under oath when he said it. And so he could never be guilty of perjury for saying it. His perjury arose from his very specific grand jury testimony.
To shoehorn any of this into “hypocrisy,” you’d have to point to some statement of his condeming blow jobs, cheating, or sex between boss and subordinate. Which he may well have made, and which indeed would make him hypocritcal on this point.
And I’m perfectly fine with substituting “giant douche” for all these behaviors that have been heretofore been inaccurately called hypocritical. For one thing, “hypocrite” means something very specific; “giant douche” would seem an outstanding term to encompass a wide variety of non-specific but contemptible behavior. But to the extent that “giant douche” includes hypocrites, it must adhere to the same strict specifics.
Here’s a variation I’ve also seen on these boards: a hypocrite is someone whose actions or statements contradict those held by or attributed to other people on their end of the political spectrum.
Uh, no, it isn’t. A hypocrite is someone whose behavior is in contradiction with their stated beliefs, not someone whose behavior is in contradiction with someone else’s stated beliefs, regardless of whether they belong to the same political party.
In your example, Bill Clinton is not a hypocrite. He is a liar. He has expressed no opinion or belief on the rightness or wrongness of blow jobs, nor of sexual relations, therefore, his actions cannot be shown to contradict his stated position on same.
Do you understand the distinction here?
I didn’t ask if he was a hypocrite, I asked if he lied. You and Bricker made the leap to assume I asked if he was a hypocrite. That specific quote was from a press conference, but the perjury charges stemmed from grand jury testimony where he was asked, “did you have sexual relations with Mrs Lewinsky?” I should have made that part more clear.
So why is this relevant? What does it have to do with hypocrites?
Consider a Catholic Priest that gets up on his pulpit every Sunday and says, “It is wrong for a priest to have sexual relations with little boys.”
Then you find out he gets blown by an alter boy after every mass, and have a cum stained dress to prove it.
Is he a hypocrite? Or is the definition of “sexual relations” vague enough that we are the ones guilty of imputing a set of beliefs to someone?
Based on reading through the gambler example, as long as at least one person doesn’t think sexual relations includes blow jobs, we fail the hypocrite test.
You see, what the priest really meant to say was, “It’s wrong for a priest to have sexual relations with little boys, unless situations change, I’ve got blueballs so bad I think I’m going to die, they’re begging for it, and I get caught.”
So… the Bill Clinton example really had fuck all to do with anything then.
In your new not-very-improved-at-all-really example with the priest, it doesn’t matter what anyone else defines “sexual relations” as; that has nothing to do with whether or not he is a hypocrite.
If the priest, in his own mind, has somehow managed to truly separate blow jobs from being any kind of sexual relations, then he would never see his own hypocrisy, since everyone else (hopefully, for the sake of argument, okay? ffs) would call that part of sexual relations. We would think he was delusional, a liar to himself, and a reprehensible human being, and we would call him a hypocrite, but he himself might not until he acknowledged the cognitive dissonance going on in his own head.
If the priest knows that he is lying when he claims that blow jobs are not sexual relations, because he’d rather lie and get the blow job, then he is a hypocrite.
You don’t get to say what other people think.
Yes, it established a base point. Does the term sexual relations include blowjobs? Does the term traditional values include gambling?
It also shows how weaselly and ridiculous this whole exercise is.
Well, it mattered in the traditional values example. The gambler was called a hypocrite, but Bricker said he’s not, because the definition of traditional values is to vague and we don’t get to tell someone what the definition of is is.
So what are you actually trying to say? It sounds like I can’t call someone a hypocrite if they themselves don’t believe they are.
You eventually said we would call him a hypocrite, but you didn’t say we could.
Can we call the priest a hypocrite? Is this an example of someone being a hypocrite?
Well, I wasn’t trying to say it before, but I’ll say it as clearly as I can now: you do not understand the concept of hypocrisy. It has eluded you.
ETA: You can call anyone anything you want. You will not always be correct. In your case, when you are calling someone a hypocrite, you are misapplying the word, because, as you have indicated a few times in this thread, you do not understand the concept.
Yes, a hypocrite is someone who judges and condemns others for failing to meet a standard that he himself does not. An example would be someone with a background of a long-term affair in his forties dismissing it as a “youthful indiscretion” while working to impeach a guy for getting a blowjob. Or for decrying the other party’s failure to produce a balanced budget after having voted for most of the debt on the books.
Is it correct to call the priest a hypocrite, yes or no?
[url=http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/hypocrite]
Helpfully bolded. Good luck.