- Insidious- slowly and subtly harmful or destructive
- Endemic- belonging or native to a particular people or country
- Rancorous- having, showing, or arising from intense often vicious ill will, spite, or hatred
- Pedantic- too concerned with formal rules and details
- Pejorative- having negative connotations
Concepts:
- Envy is a feeling that no person in their right mind, would own up to. In doing so, a person is admitting to being mean, uncaring, and heartless, characteristics which they will most likely be rejected for. This causes a person to bottle up the emotion, in order to be considered a moral and decent person.
- In The Rhetoric by Aristotle, he believes that envy is the start of admiration. When one is envious of another, he/she will try to imitate that trait or quality. As the saying goes, “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. But Epstein believes the only good thing about envy is to get rid of it.
- “Jealousy is properly restricted to contexts involving affairs of the heart; envy is used more broadly of resentful contemplation of a more fortunate person.” Epstein refers to Bryan A. Garner in his 1998 Dictionary of Modern American Usage. His idea was that although people may switch up the usage of jealous and envy, they have separate deeper meanings. Jealousy is over love, while envy is wanting something another lucky person has. To me, the quote meant that jealousy is being selfish and overbearing over a loved one, while envy is the comparison of fortunes, in money, family, friendship, careers, personality, and appearance. In other words, it is the belief that the grass is greener on the other side.
2. The main idea of this essay was to insist that jealousy and envy are not the same, and have completely different meanings. Epstein uses many examples to show the contrast. The quotation that best explained his idea is: “If jealousy is, in cliché parlance, spoken as of the ‘green-eyed monster,’ envy is cross-, squinty-, and blearily red-eyed.” He makes the contrast that to be envious is much worse than being jealous, and envy brings out the ugliness in a person.
3. Epstein included a quote from William Hazlitt: “Envy, among other ingredients, has a love of justice in it.” We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good fortune.” He felt that people are not envious of those who need or deserve something, for example, a homeless man winning the lottery, but are envious of those who do not, like a student getting a high grade based on poor work. In that case, if the reward was undeserved, there is justice in wanting a correction. However, I wonder, what if the person in question not only wants the injustice undone, but fixed upon themselves? Isn’t that being envious? And furthermore, would they even notice the injustice if not comparing their own fortune to that of another?
4 comments:
This is a very interesting perspective of a feeling. I would have thought that for every person its different. But I guess it all comes down to the same thing.
I think that envy does not really relate with heartlessness, ugliness or carelessness. When a person is envious of someone else, I think that they are really angry at themselves for not being able to have certain things and not the fact that they don't want the next guy to have it. One can avoid being envious by simply finding satisfaction in what they do have and dimish desires for certain things which are probably worthless when you take a closer look at them.
I think that if a person wants that injustice undone to the person who received it, but wishes that they themselves received it instead is indeed being envious. I dont really believe that people are envious of what other people have, but rather that they themselves dont have it. I dont believe that people are envious of whether or not someone received something because they deserved it or didnt deserve it because if that person didnt deserve it, they wouldnt care; they would want it for themselves. I think its more of the fact that they dont have something rather than them being envious of what other people do have and how they got it. Thus, if they didnt compare their own fortune to that of another's, they probably wouldnt be envious at all, or even care about it in general.
I believe that there are different levels of envy. There is an envy that is almost justifiable. Why? There is an envy that is justifiable because it relates to correcting a wrong - like the example you gave. However,wanting to fix an injustice is more of a cause for envy. It isn't envy in its pure form but it does take shape. When anything begins to take shape, it is understandable that the end result is waht it is taking shape of.
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