RE: self-confession njc

[sl . m]

Wally, we would never say a "confessed alcoholic". We'd say "he confessed to being an alcoholic" meaning - he confessed it to someone else (and with this comes a sense of shame, of the confession having been dragged out of him perhaps, and heads hanging low.)

But "he's a self-confessed alcoholic" means "he has admitted it to himself", and this has much less of a sense of shame, and possibly none. He confessed it to hiimself (and to us only as a by-product), voluntarily, shamelessly, perhaps even happily or defiantly.

Does the confusion stem from the fact that "to confess" can be transitive and intransitive? In the case of "confessed alcoholic" it would be transitive, so it would have to be "confessed-to someone-else alcoholic" or "confessed-to-self alcoholic".

Sarah


At 6:13 AM -0300 02/16/2003, Wally Kairuz wrote:

but isn't that the definition of *confess* (if we know that someone is a
self-confessed something, then the confession is or has been made public,
not only to oneself, so i find the prefix superfluous).