Uh? You mean the Catholic Church?
Pet peeve: it’s self-deprecating.
As a negative term, in the same vein as “hypocrite”, of course we use it for others more than we use it of ourselves. Would you like to ban every negative term on the boards because they’re usually used merely to attack others?
And can we have an example or two of a particularly inaccurate use of the term? As I said above, I always seem to see it used in the correct way…
[QUOTE=Atticus Finch]
Pet peeve: it’s self-deprecating.
[QUOTE]
No.
“Belittling oneself is almost universally referred to as self-deprecation these days, through constant misapplication, though it is a corruption of self-depreciation. Deprecate, which had meant plead against, now primarily means depreciate, or belittle.” (From the web)
But I’ll allow you your neologism. Language evolves.
But I think you still miss my point that making assumptions about other people’s mental states is not something to be codified as an argumentative tactic.
For my money, deprecating one’s self is exactly what’s going on. See def’n. 3:
“3 a : PLAY DOWN : make little of <speaks five languages … but deprecates this facility – Time> b : BELITTLE, DISPARAGE <the most reluctantly admired and least easily deprecated of … novelists – New Yorker>”
It also appears, from a cursory examination (neither dictionary.com nor m-w.com is exactly thorough), that both convey the relevant meaning.
“Deprecate” has had the meaning of pleading against or disapproving of one’s own faults since at least 1641. Hardly a neologism. Both “self-depreciate” and “self-deprecate” do not appear before the 19th century. While I’ll grant that “self-depreciate” is the older of those two words, it’s still a couple of centuries younger than this meaning of “deprecate”.
It’s a useful psychological term, and if we’re out of the Pit it can be used of ideas rather than of people. That is, one poster is allowed to call another poster’s ideas meglomaniacal, hypocritical or to suggest that two mutually incompatible ideas must cause cognitive dissonance.
“Mutually incompatible” ideas is a nebulous concept. Who is to judge that the “ideas” are incompatible?
In one of the cases that prompted my tirade, Jamaico-British brothers spouting “love” and “homocide” (sic) were felt to be demonstrating c…d… I think a much more useful critique would have concentrated on the concept of “love”. Without deconstructing this all-too-often meaninglessly-used word, just about anything that the brothers advocated alongside “love” could be construed to be incompatible with it. Anything of a non-passive bent, anyway.
Rather than the long phrase “holder of mutually incompatible ideas”, I think I prefer the pithier alternative: “human”.
I think that the reggae singers simultaneously advocating loving your fellow man (as in agape) and murdering him is a perfect example of cognitive dissonance. It’s not an abstract situation construing just about anything to be contradictory to love, it’s about a very specific situation. The ideas of loving someone and murdering them are entirely contradictory - I presume you agree with this.
We accept a certain human ability to hold contradictory views, as you say (your “pithier alternative”), but this is far beyond normal human behaviour. The concepts of “cognitive dissonance” and the “true believer” are extremely useful in attempting to understand this particularly hideous contradiction
But was it ‘agape’? The word ‘love’ gets thrown around a lot and becomes about as meaningful as ‘okay’, as in ‘I’m okay’ in answer to the question ‘How are you?’
Yes, but not, of course, if you substitute ‘kill’ for ‘murder’. (Hence the Biblical injunction.)
Is that the royal ‘we’?
And what do you mean by ‘true’ believer? (Tricky word ‘true’.)
I chose ‘agape’ as opposed to ‘eros’. I’m trying to choose the loosest definition of love or good feeling for your fellow man, and no matter how low you set that bar, it isn’t compatible with the idea of murder.
But we’re not talking about any kind of permissible killing in this case, no kind of self-defence or anything of the sort. The reggae artists in the thread you refer to are discussing the murder of some people and loving your fellow man at the same time. Do you not find these two ideas, murder and love (in its loosest form) entirely and utterly contradictory?
Don’t be facetious. Try “It is generally accepted that there is a certain human capacity…”, if you’d prefer.
It’s all one phrase - “true believer” (scroll down about half-way on the page). It’s probably not good psychology, but then neither are Freud’s ideas any more, and we still use them, at least for illustrative purposes. I think it’s a useful concept.
I suspect you doth protest too much, roger.
Could it not be that the term Cognitive Dissonance (a well supported psychological phenomenon) actually describes your state of mind due to your own beliefs, rather uncomfortably accurately?
Look, Sentient, couldn’t you have stayed in Amsterdam a few more days? It was all going swimmingly until you turned up.
Heh heh, sorry roger - I have promised to cut you some slack and I should stick to it. It is just that you are clearly an intelligent chap in other respects, and CD is the brain’s way of saying that something is logically “jarring”.
That break has obviously done you a lot of good, Sentient. I’m thinking of using this for my signature.