“Survivor” is a word that has been misused, abused and squandered.
Call me picky, fastidious, punctilious, finicky, nitpicking or even a pain in the derrière, but accuracy is important to me. Misused words are like recurring four-lettered words: they bother me.
Lately, we have heard a lot about the sufferers of sexual abuse. I definitely feel compassion and empathy for their ordeals, but to be correct, these individuals are not “survivors”, they are “victims”.
The dictionary defines “survivor” as “a person who survives, especially a person remaining alive after an event in which others have died.”
As far as I know, none of the plaintiffs have died. They have definitely been traumatized, and they were right to bring this issue to the fore, but nobody has died.
A cancer patient who is in remission or Elie Wiesel are survivors, a sexually abused person is not.
In the same vein, a horny teenage boy “assaulted” (déniaisé) by a libidinous woman is not a “survivor” but (in the eyes of many) a “lucky bastard”.
A robbery witness often describes what he saw as follows:
“The gentleman pulled a large caliber handgun and shot the cashier twice.”
Well, this man is no “gentleman’. According to a reliable dictionary again, a gentleman is “a chivalrous, courteous, or honorable man.”Anybody who robs and shoots another human being is definitely not an “honorable” person.
In addition, I intensely dislike the so-called French expression “double entendre”. A Frenchman would not understand the intended meaning of these words. The right French expression for “pun” is “un jeu de mots”.
Do not misuse words. If you do, you devalue them. Do not call Trumpland embezzlers “principled men”. There is nothing remotely honorable about crooked politicians who steal from their constituents.
And last but not least, please do not “assault” me for speaking what I believe. I am not exonerating the villains; I am simply correcting what I consider to be a linguistic error.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Alain