Talk:victim

RFV discussion: March–April 2020

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for verification (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

---

victim

Rfv-sense: "A person who suffers any other injury, loss, or damage as a result of a voluntary undertaking."

This seems like a bit of a POV addition. I doubt that there are any uses in which there is not some external event or agent that is deemed the cause of the victimhood, whatever share of responsibility the victim might have (shouldn't have tried to climb Mount Everest, crossed the street without looking, lived in the floodplain, dressed 'provocatively', etc). At there very least, this def. would need to be reworded. Possibly some of the other definitions may needed to amended to suggest that victimhood is not necessarily a universally agreed fact. Better might be a usage note that states that the claim to be a victim, because it implies some kind of entitlement to or merit of aid, can be challenged. DCDuring (talk) 17:31, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

Several of our definitions seem like they should be combined, but there will also need to be some rewording: consider how often you can say someone is "a victim of his own (pride, arrogance, incompetence, etc)". That person has not been "harmed by another", nor was he the aggrieved party "in a crime", and calling his pride "a disaster or other adverse circumstance" seems like an unintuitive use of those words. I'll see if I can revise this entry in a moment. - -sche (discuss) 18:04, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I rewrote the entry, with one main sense (plus the religious-sacrifice sense) with subsenses for common cases which other authorities tend to treat as separate senses or subsenses. See what you think of it now. Two things I'm still unhappy with: (1) I don't like combining "victim of his own pride", "victim of the townspeople's distrust of outsiders" and "victims of a racist system" into one subsense, but I'm not sure how to cleanly and sensibly split them, except by having one sense for "victim of one's own emotions, biases, etc" and one for "victim of other people's emotions, biases, etc", which seems silly. (2) I'm not sure the "narratology" sense is needed or distinct. In a book about e.g. a flood, would the victims of the flood not be considered victims in a narratological discussion of the narrative? What if there is no villain, per, only the flood? I think flood-victims would be considered victims and hence the "narratological" sense does not seem distinct. Evidence could show me to be wrong. - -sche (discuss) 19:02, 2 March 2020 (UTC)

I'll see if I can learn anything from Keywords 21. DCDuring (talk) 04:37, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Keywords 21 talks a lot about the sociology of victimhood, including the notion that victimhood entitles victims to sympathy, accommodation, and even compensation from society as a whole, even when society as a whole is not responsible. They also refer to the notion being controversial. But their article on victim was a little light on lexicographically constructive information.

The fact that the Keywords Project selected the word to be one of those they thought should be added to Williams' original list could mean we should spend some time on it. I have inserted templates {{R:Keywords}} and {{R:Keywords 21st}} in our entries for the words the two works cover. I will finish adding {{R:Keywords 21st}} today. DCDuring (talk) 14:54, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Suggestions that [some people believe that] victims are entitled to sympathy seem likely to be extralexical, like also another commonly ascribed attribute I got to thinking about, the idea that a victim is passive. - -sche (discuss) 20:48, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Among the sometime believers that victims deserve sympathy, aid, etc are the victims themselves, advocates, politicians, legislators, et al. Some disagree that certain types of persons claiming victimhood deserve sympathy, aid, etc. and challenge whether they are truly victims. The question of what is 'true' victimhood would seem to indeed be lexical. Does victimhood bring entitlements? Certainly it does in many cases.

Victimhood has progressed from the passivity of a person being sacrificed to a god to those who seem to actively risk victimhood by, eg, climbing Mt. Everest, etc. as I mentioned above. In criminal law, the victim is passive, one who suffers the harm from the actions of the doer.

The question is how much of the usage context we need to take into account. For a word as fraught with meaning as this, it verges on irresponsible not to wrestle with the implications, which derive from that usage context. DCDuring (talk) 23:12, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

One can be a victim of the pollution of an identifiable group of polluters. The polluters may not be criminals, but only tortfeasors.

And note that a victim in Ancient Greece was entitled to help unconditionally:

• 2014, “Against Meidas, On the Punch”, in Robin Waterfield, transl., Selected Speeches, translation of original by Demosthenes:

  In the first place, all these laws about damages—let's start with them—stipulate a fine of double the damage for a deliberate offence, and just the single amount otherwise. This is as one would expect: the victim's entitlement to help is unconditional, but the law prescribes a different degree of condemnation of the perpetrator depending on whether of nor his actions were deliberate.

This is hardly isolated. The nexus between victimhood and entitlement to redress is clear. DCDuring (talk) 23:45, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, OK, what wording do you suggest including, and where (definitions? usage note?)? I don't see right to redress in the definitions at other dictionaries I looked at, and I see issues with making it definitional / part of the definition, but see how a usage note would have room to cover those issues. AFAICT, right to redress inheres not in the word "victim" (a "stabbing/rape/flood survivor" has as much entitlement as a "stabbing/rape/flood victim", including when "victim" is specifically avoided by some people e.g. for rape survivors due to implications of passivity), but in some conditions of being harmed; but which harms / "victims" are excluded from redress is to some extent pragmatic (a "murder victim", or a person who is called a "flood victim" or "victim of incurable illness" because they died, cannot be made whole, though perhaps heirs could be in the first and perhaps second but normally not third case) and to some extent set by culture and legal system (someone who was "a victim of his own arrogance" is not typically granted relief; whether a victim of a group's distrust is entitled to relief is nebulous; whether victims of an economic downturn are entitled to relief varies; whether victims of racism are entitled to redress becomes "political" and in racist states like Nazi Germany they may specifically legally and culturally not be entitled; etc), so trying to split definitions according to which categories are entitled to relief seems inadvisable and/or infeasible. (Also, AFAIK the term is applied mostly without regard to whether or not the person has a right to or receives redress, or redress is even on the table or in the mind of the speaker, like if I talk about victims of a 4th century outbreak of disease or war, without any thought of making them whole again. OTOH, I recognize that e.g. a would-be murderer who is stabbed by his intended target will not generally be called a victim or entitled to relief. This seems connected to the principle of equity that one must have clean hands.) I suppose usage notes could summarize the conditions of entitlement to redress. - -sche (discuss) 07:28, 4 March 2020 (UTC)

I think you've all done a lot of good work to clean this up, but we have not yet really addressed the original RFV issue - which is whether there is justification for a separate narratology definition. Personally, I find myself ambivalent about this one. I have added a number of citations in hopes that having some concrete examples can help us decide. They are somewhat disparate, not necessarily referring to a work of fiction, but also including the "stories" we tell about what has happened. Kiwima (talk) 21:10, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Personally, I don't think the narratology sense exists as a distinct sense: among other things (as I remarked above) even in a literature-class analysis of a dozen books focused specifically on narratology, I expect there could AFAIK be victims in a book with no "villains" but just e.g. environmental factors). It just seems like the general sense (and its various subsenses), which I would fold the citations into. - -sche (discuss) 08:41, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Just because a work of fiction has a victim in it does not make it fulfill the narrative "victim role". If there is a narratology sense, it is this "victim role", which sometimes is alluded to by the phrase "play the victim". And that is a sense, I believe, that requires that there be an evil-doer (the victim of circumstance does not work that way). That was what I was trying to get at with the citations I added. But, as I said, I am rather ambivalent about this, so I would like to know what most others think. Kiwima (talk) 10:09, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Having a separate sense seems a bit like having a definition for dress "An element of the costume of actors." or for word "unit of communication in fictional universes.". DCDuring (talk) 16:51, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Hmm, that's a fair point. I will say, FWIW, I don't see any sense like this in other dictionaries I checked; even though they all have multiple (non-sub-)senses taking weird partial "bites" out of the "pie" that is our sense 1 (and all its subsenses), none of them has a definition that's specific to a person victimized by a villain, every definition they have that allows for victimization by another person also allows for victimization by something impersonal (except possibly the ones which have a specific sense for a person victimized by a crime, which is, in turn, more narrow than the narratology definition). However, perhaps we should make "one who is harmed or killed by a villain" or "one who is harmed, conquered or manipulated by a villain" a subsense of our sense 1? I'm not sure whether that'd be sensible or not. I'll try to think about this some more (and, like you, hope for input from more people). - -sche (discuss) 21:44, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

I think that's kind of missing the point (if there is one here) - it is not that the victim is victimized by the villian, it is that the victim is a specific role or trope in the story. Melodrama is a form of fiction that requires certain roles - the evil-doer and the victim, without those roles, it is not melodrama. Kiwima (talk) 22:53, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

RFV-resolved I have removed the narratology definition, as we do not seem to have any consensus that it is not redundant with the others. Kiwima (talk) 13:45, 2 April 2020 (UTC)