This piece of knowledge I have to initially tribute to my high school, freshman year, English teacher, Dr. Lane. I don’t know why I chose to remember this, as she only went off on this tangent for what seemed about a minute or two before continuing with the lecture. Maybe it chose to be remembered by me, sticking out like an intentional detour that a tour guide might take to promote the local vendors.
The gist of her commentary was that the vast majority of people inappropriately use the term jealous when they really mean envious. Moreover, she lamented, because so many people (students and professors alike) were misusing the term jealousy, it was becoming synonymous with the term envy.
That was news to me at the time. I had thought they were cousins all along…
She went on to explain that envy means to covet something owned by another, whereas jealousy was more akin to the fear of losing someone’s loyalty and/or resentment of a rival, before returning to the topic at hand… something about parts of speech or Les Miserables, I can’t recall. My brain was still downloading content, I guess.
Sure enough, while working on Affect Engineering and pouring over hundreds of entries in psychology dictionaries I discovered that she was right, but that’s not really the point I want to make here.
If I could be mistaken about one interpretation of one word, then what other words might I be using incorrectly? What other tools of the trade might I be bending, warping, or breaking through their incorrect usage? Though no language is indestructible, some, it would seem, are clearly hardier than others.