Hero

Today The Zero Boss announced some changes about next month's Blogging for Books contest. It starts Monday. If you want to enter, the topic will be posted Monday, October 4, as a main blog entry.

In the past, heros sacrificed their lives to protect others. Gradually the meaning altered to make dying optional. Now the term is used to indicate someone who leads a cause, succeeds in an endeavor. Read all the definitions from various resources. While I mean no disrespect for any occupation that involves endangering oneself to help others, calling people heros simply for doing their jobs seems counterproductive, linguistically speaking. What do we call a woman who runs into the street to snatch her child from the path of an oncoming car, saves the baby, and dies as a result? Is there a new uber term? Superhero? Could we revert to the original connotation and invent a new term for those who don't sacrifice their very lives? What about "champion" and all the rest of the synonyms?

Champions of linguistic freedom wail about the need for a living language in which usage fluctuates with the times. Extremists on the right side of words beg for stasis. In the case of "hero", I'm siding with the SOTS (Save Our Tongue Society). We have a perfectly good lexicon of words with a wide range of applications for people who perform remarkably well. Let's save the heros for true heros.

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