Words of the Day: Blame/Fault
It is very interesting to see how people assign blame or fault, sometimes not realising that the two are very different things in deed. "It's your fault!" or "You are to blame!" are not equivalent.
To begin with, 'blame' (c.1200) seems to come from Greek blasphemein, 'to utter evil'. If you blame someone, you are therefore speaking evil about them, blaspheming them. The fault may be theirs, but the sin is yours. The Greek word blasphemein has a strange and mysterious etymology. The first part of it seems related to blema, 'wound'; it has been also linked to blaptikos ('hurtful') or blax ('slack in body and/or mind').
But the blema etymology is even more interesting; it is linked to the Frankish blesmir which means 'to injure or to make pale'. It is the word from which we get 'blemish' — an impurity, a spot of white, a blanched portion. With the earth sciences term 'astrobleme', the whole thing comes full circle. 'Astrobleme' is the geological term for a meteorite impact crater that has 'scarred over' with time. The word, from Greek aster ('star') and blema, means 'star wound'.
So when we talk about 'blame', we imply 'blemish', and we also indirectly imply that the situation involves us casting an aspersion at someone else. It may or may not be their fault, but we are actively assigning the penalty, the cause, anything bad that comes out of it, to the person(s) we blame.
'Fault', on the other hand, comes (through some evolution) from the Latin fallere, from which we get 'false' and 'fallible'. To say that someone is at fault is to imply that they deceived you (or you were deceived) by looking as if they could do something that they didn't or couldn't (or wouldn't). In geology (again), and in many other areas of knowledge, 'fault' means a lapse, a gap, or rift in the continuum, process or routine. It implies that things looked good until evil was found in them (well, maybe that's too dramatic).
Where 'blame' implies active participation on the part of the person blamed, and requires an active accusation, 'fault' implies negative or passive participation on the part of the person faulted. To clarify, you really ought to blame people for what they did, and fault people for what they did not do. So when we say that some hypothetical Mr K is to blame for the chaos affecting some area of society, we mean that he did something to cause this state; when we fault him, we mean that he should have done something but didn't.
At this point, you can probably tell that you can both blame and fault people in certain situations — if they did the wrong thing and then failed to do the right thing (or vice versa).
To begin with, 'blame' (c.1200) seems to come from Greek blasphemein, 'to utter evil'. If you blame someone, you are therefore speaking evil about them, blaspheming them. The fault may be theirs, but the sin is yours. The Greek word blasphemein has a strange and mysterious etymology. The first part of it seems related to blema, 'wound'; it has been also linked to blaptikos ('hurtful') or blax ('slack in body and/or mind').
But the blema etymology is even more interesting; it is linked to the Frankish blesmir which means 'to injure or to make pale'. It is the word from which we get 'blemish' — an impurity, a spot of white, a blanched portion. With the earth sciences term 'astrobleme', the whole thing comes full circle. 'Astrobleme' is the geological term for a meteorite impact crater that has 'scarred over' with time. The word, from Greek aster ('star') and blema, means 'star wound'.
So when we talk about 'blame', we imply 'blemish', and we also indirectly imply that the situation involves us casting an aspersion at someone else. It may or may not be their fault, but we are actively assigning the penalty, the cause, anything bad that comes out of it, to the person(s) we blame.
'Fault', on the other hand, comes (through some evolution) from the Latin fallere, from which we get 'false' and 'fallible'. To say that someone is at fault is to imply that they deceived you (or you were deceived) by looking as if they could do something that they didn't or couldn't (or wouldn't). In geology (again), and in many other areas of knowledge, 'fault' means a lapse, a gap, or rift in the continuum, process or routine. It implies that things looked good until evil was found in them (well, maybe that's too dramatic).
Where 'blame' implies active participation on the part of the person blamed, and requires an active accusation, 'fault' implies negative or passive participation on the part of the person faulted. To clarify, you really ought to blame people for what they did, and fault people for what they did not do. So when we say that some hypothetical Mr K is to blame for the chaos affecting some area of society, we mean that he did something to cause this state; when we fault him, we mean that he should have done something but didn't.
At this point, you can probably tell that you can both blame and fault people in certain situations — if they did the wrong thing and then failed to do the right thing (or vice versa).
Labels: Etymology
etched with acid at 12:01:00 am
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