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When it comes to things like suicide, people say "It's the cowards way out". I'm wondering whether it would be incorrect for someone to say "suicide is a cowards way out".
I don't know the answer to your question. Hope someone who does will post.
(Should "cowards" as above have an apostrophe, to show possessiveness of "way out"?)
Because I don't know what is correct grammatically in your above verbiage, if I wanted to write that, I would do it thus -
Suicide is the way out for a coward. Or, suicide is a way out for cowards.
Guess by phrasing it this way, I'm taking the way out of the dummy. Or should I say the dummy's way out... ;-).
Last edited by LilyMae521; 07-09-2018 at 08:12 AM..
In your sentence "It's the coward's way out." the word coward is possessive, so the possessive apostrophe should be used. Without the apostrophe, coward, a singular term, becomes cowards, a group term. One coward, or a group of cowards.
A group can still possess a way out in common, so when it does, the proper use is cowards', with an apostrophe after the letter s.
This apostrophe isn't used much any more, but a plural can become confusing without it. The word 'the' in your sentence implies a plural- as in 'the horseman'. All horsemen ride horses. So "The horseman's guide to riding." holds a universal element of truth in it.
The use of the word 'the' makes the spelling tricky, as a singular word can become plural in meaning. A better way to write it would be to use "A coward's way out." This makes it clear the person is a single coward. The word 'the' is proper usage only if all cowards take the same way out.
It's one of those symbolic speech things that attempt to make something universal when it is not. "The cowards" do many things other than committing suicide. So, while false, the use of 'the' adds an added air of social condemnation to the sentence that doesn't actually exist in reality.
Interestingly, suicide is now considered cowardly. 100 years or more ago, saving the last bullet for yourself was considered brave and an honorable way to die. So suicide was thought to be anything but cowardly; the coward lives, while the brave man fights to the end and takes his own life before he allows another to take it from him.
Hara-kiri, the worst possible way to die, was the way the Japanese samurai chose to commit suicide. Cutting one's intestines in half is a very slow, exceedingly painful way to die. Death is certain, but very slow in coming.
For them, it was the ultimate insult a warrior could give to his opponent. An enemy could not inflict any worse agony on a samurai than the pain the samurai would willingly inflict on himself.
The Japanese warriors considered this to be both the ultimate sacrifice to their leaders and a way of absolving their wrongs and/or failures.
Western culture seldom took suicide to such an extreme. But the idea of a noble death at one's own hands still lives on in places in our culture.
Suicide sometimes shows a person's resolve to hold command of his own life to the end. A refusal to allow nature to take its course, and a refusal to allow anyone else the power to decide whether the person lives or dies.
Last edited by banjomike; 07-09-2018 at 02:29 PM..
100 years or more ago, saving the last bullet for yourself was considered brave and an honorable way to die.
I think you might be mistaking Western/dime novel drama for reality, or a fairly narrow special case for a general one.
The only case for "save the last bullet for yourself" I can think of comes from tales of being attacked by Indians, wherein being captured alive almost certainly meant scalping, torture or other lingering, painful death - preceded by rape for women. It was better to kill yourself than go out being carved into hamburger.
Other than reflections of that in 1930s gangster movies, I can't think of a supporting case.
"The coward" does seem to be a nearly unique usage, though.
I think you might be mistaking Western/dime novel drama for reality, or a fairly narrow special case for a general one.
The only case for "save the last bullet for yourself" I can think of comes from tales of being attacked by Indians, wherein being captured alive almost certainly meant scalping, torture or other lingering, painful death - preceded by rape for women. It was better to kill yourself than go out being carved into hamburger.
Other than reflections of that in 1930s gangster movies, I can't think of a supporting case.
"The coward" does seem to be a nearly unique usage, though.
I only picked out one example. Granted, it was a colorful example, and I should have picked a better one, but a century ago, before antibiotics and mental health became parts of medicine, suicide was seen widely as the best of all bad alternatives.
It was pretty common, for example, that a severe diabetic would choose to drink himself to certain death rather than face the agonies of the slower death by the disease.
While these suicides weren't necessarily seen as being noble, they were accepted sorrowfully as being a more merciful death than the one that was coming by natural means.
That attitude began to change around 1900 with the huge waves of immigration. Many of the new immigrants were Catholic, which began to change the thoughts, and suicide plagued immigrant communities. When a family's mother or father was lost to it, the death affected the community at large, as the orphans needed care at a time when the government was completely outside of all medicine.
One easy way to lower the suicide rates was to make the act despicable. That changed after World War I, when so many men came back with terrible injuries, but the attitude that suicide was bad eventually returned and prevailed.
These days with assisted suicide, the attitudes are changing again.
I'm a history nut, and this kind of social history has fascinated me for a long time. As a society, we are now a lot more uncomfortable with the thought of dying than we once were as a people.
Nowadays, we are always fighting some terminal illness before succumbing to it.
100 years ago, it was more important to be composed and prepared to meet our maker in a peaceful state of mind than it was to fight to the end. That was a good death.
A fight to the end was a bad one, but if it was inevitable, it was better to meed it on one's own terms so as to be composed and go out as gracefully as possible.
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