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Pastimes : Clown-Free Zone... sorry, no clowns allowed -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: oldirtybastard who wrote (405988)	6/1/2010 8:14:29 AM
From: Jeff Jordan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 436258

...all the worlds a stage I think the Greeks invented that saying too?.......Us uppity Americans<g> The word hypocrisy comes from the Greek ?p????s?? (hypokrisis), which means "play-acting", "acting out", "coward" or "dissembling".[2] The word hypocrite is from the Greek word ?p????t?? (hypokrites), the agentive noun associated with ?p??????µa? (hypokrinomai), i.e. "I play a part". Both derive from the verb ?????, "judge" (»???s?, "judgement" »???t??? (kritiki), "critics") presumably because the performance of a dramatic text by an actor was to involve a degree of interpretation, or assessment, of that text. Alternatively, the word is an amalgam of the Greek prefix hypo-, meaning "under", and the verb "krinein", meaning "to sift or decide". Thus the original meaning implied a deficiency in the ability to sift or decide. This deficiency, as it pertains to one's own beliefs and feelings, informs the word's contemporary meaning.[3] Whereas hypokrisis applied to any sort of public performance (including the art of rhetoric), hypokrites was a technical term for a stage actor and was not considered an appropriate role for a public figure. In Athens in the 4th Century BC, for example, the great orator Demosthenes ridiculed his rival Aeschines, who had been a successful actor before taking up politics, as a hypokrites whose skill at impersonating characters on stage made him an untrustworthy politician. This negative view of the hypokrites, perhaps combined with the Roman disdain for actors, later shaded into the originally neutral hypokrisis. It is this later sense of hypokrisis as "play-acting", i.e. the assumption of a counterfeit persona, that gives the modern word hypocrisy its negative connotation.