<snip>
> You seem to place a lot of responsibility for this
> 'addiction' stuff on what we have 'downloaded' from
> others. It reminds me of a conversation we had over
> dinner last night on the difference between a certain
> phrase in English and its French counterpart. In English,
> one would say, "I was disappointed by X." In French, it
> would be "J'ai été déçu par le X."
>
> In the French, the word déçu is a form of the verb
> decevoir, which is translated as 'to disappoint' in
> modern French, but comes from an older word that meant
> 'to deceive.' This struck me as an interesting
> distinction. In one language (English) there is no
> implication that the person who is disappointed is
> experiencing that disappointment because of the actions
> of others; they could just as easily have created the
> sense of disappointment themselves, as a result
> of their own unrealistic expectations. In the other
> language, there is a residual sub-meaning that implies
> that the disappointment *was* caused by something or
> someone outside ourselves. I just thought it was funny,
> that's all.
Hate to, er, disappoint you, but if you're basing
your understanding of the implications of a term on
its earlier meaning, "disappoint" does indeed imply
outside agency. From the Online Etymology Dictionary:
disappoint
1434, from M.Fr. desappointer "undo the appointment,
remove from office," from des- "dis" + appointer
"appoint." Modern sense of "to frustrate expectations"
(1494) is from secondary meaning of "fail to keep an
appointment."
Interestingly, Merriam-Webster's definitions of the
term in its modern usage do not include any sense
that does not involve outside agency either:
transitive verb : to fail to meet the expectation or hope of :
FRUSTRATE *the team disappointed its fans*
intransitive verb : to cause disappointment *where the show
disappoints most is in the work of the younger generation John
Ashbery*
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