Fine Distinctions.

Hazlitt presents excerpts from Eli Burnstein’s Dictionary of Fine Distinctions; here’s “Ethics vs. Morality”:

Ethics refers to intelligible principles of right and wrong.

Code of ethics
Workplace ethics

Morality refers to right and wrong as a felt sense.

Moral compass
Moral fibre

One is rational, explicit, and defined by one’s social or professional community; the other is emotional, deep-seated, and dictated by one’s conscience or god.

That’s why an immoral act sounds graver than an unethical one: One may get you fired, but the other could land you in hell.

The Fine Print

With characteristic sass, usage master H. W. Fowler notes that “The two words, once fully synonymous, & existing together only because English scholars knew both Greek & Latin [ethics being Greek in origin, morality Latin], have so far divided functions that neither is superfluous…ethics is the science of morals, & morals are the practice of ethics.”

While Fowler is here alluding to ethics as a branch of philosophy, the conceptual flavor of the word can be heard in its everyday sense as well: Whether theorized by Aristotle or spelled out in a code of conduct, ethics is morality, as it were, with glasses on.

He also discusses “Tights vs. Leggings vs. Pantyhose vs. Stockings” (“Less common today, stockings are detached undergarments that stop around the thigh”), “Maze vs. Labyrinth” (” A maze has many paths and challenges you to find the exit. A labyrinth has one path and draws you toward its centre.”), “Autocrat vs. Despot vs. Tyrant vs. Dictator” (“Tyrant, meanwhile, originally referred to usurpers but not necessarily bad ones—maybe they deposed a despot”), “First Cousin vs. Once Removed,” and “Modernity vs. Modernism” (“Modernity is a historical period. Modernism is a cultural movement.”). Sounds like a good book to start arguments with.

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    Some of these strike me as either dubious attempts to find denotation differences where the distinction is really one of register (or at most, of typical collocation), or inventing imaginary confusions just to resolve them. “Modernity” versus “modernism”? Really? That’s not a “fine distinction” at all. Who, exactly, is supposed to be confusing them? Apart from Mrs Malaprop or Constable Dogberry?

    The etymological fallacy also seems to be in play. The specific historical meaning of the “tyrant” etymon in Greek has no bearing on its meaning in modern English, for example. You might as well claim that “idiot” really means “a person who takes no interest in politics or current affairs.”

  2. Come, come, books like this aren’t actually about resolving significant differences — that’s what we have philosophy and linguistics for. These books are for amusement and, as I say, for starting arguments. And Mrs Malaprop deserves nice things too!

  3. “Well, ACKCHULLY” would apparently be a good title for this work

  4. Indeed it would!

  5. David Eddyshaw says

    and, as I say, for starting arguments

    I’m sorry, I can’t agree with you there.

  6. J.W. Brewer says

    I have been told by American females of my approximate age that there is some demographic subset of American females (defined by some combination of geography and class) that use or at least formerly used “tights” as a literal synonym for “pantyhose” because they thought “pantyhose” sounded (in their specific sociolinguistic context) too lurid or sexualized or prone to provoke “nudge nudge wink wink” reactions.

  7. David Eddyshaw says

    I am reasonably sure that “pantyhose” is not a thing in the UK at all. (But then, we don’t wear anything under our kilts, either.)

  8. Jen in Edinburgh says

    I thought that tights in the US were some subset of what I would call leggings (not see through, no feet). But this is one of the things I can’t keep track of.

    The book sounds kind of fun to me!

  9. I thnk of tights as what ballet dancers wear. Also, Mel Brooks’s Robin Hood: Men in Tights.

  10. cuchuflete says

    The absence of long johns is an ethical failure with moral implications.

    Edited to add- And what of thermal u-trou?

  11. I have heard that claim about the “true” meaning of labyrinth before (and the OED comments, “Sometimes distinguished from a maze as consisting only of one convoluted path to the centre and back, rather than containing a number of dead ends”), but there is no evidence that the word has ever been limited to that meaning, in Greek or English.

  12. David Eddyshaw says

    Yes, this sort of thing seems analogous to the imaginary rule that relative “which” must always be non-restrictive.*

    “Hey, we’ve got alternatives here! Wouldn’t it be nice if they carried a meaning difference? Let’s invent one and tell people they’re uneducated if they don’t abide by it!”

    * Says Geoffrey Pullum:

    It originates in an idea popularized by Henry and Frank Fowler in a 1906 book called The King’s English. They noticed the extreme rarity of “that” introducing supplementary relatives, and it gave them an idea for tidying up: they decided English would be much neater if supplementary relatives always had “which”, and integrated relatives never did. Then the two would never overlap! Cool idea? No. The problem is that “which” has always been common in integrated relatives, so the reform proposal they wanted to push was quixotic. It largely failed, because in writing that hasn’t been altered by an American copy editor, “that” and “which” are very roughly level-pegging in integrated relatives.

  13. Brett: Indeed, if the labyrinth of Greek myth had been a single path, Theseus could have gone in clueless.

    It’s true, though, that if I hear someone around Santa Fe has made a labyrinth that people can walk, I expect something like this. If I hear someone made a maze, if would be one where you could get lost.

  14. Paul Clapham says

    I too was unclear about the distinction between tights and leggings. If there needs to be a distinction between the two then I’m happy to accept Burnstein’s explanation. Fortunately I don’t have to discuss those items frequently, so I’m not likely to be embarrassed in any case.

  15. Paul Clapham says

    As for what’s worn under the kilt, I’m a Sassenach so I’m morally/ethically enjoined from wearing a kilt.

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