Gentlemen, start your Honor!

Yep, I'm back. I almost forgot where I left my glass, har har! Well, I'll try to make this a little more regular this year, as it's been more than a year since my last post.

I think I'd like to start a campaign to reclaim the word "gentleman." Just looking at the word, it should be simple to accertain the meaning. But for some reason, it seems that people are just incapable of referring to "that man" as "that man" or "that guy" or "the schmuck over there" or "this friggin' slob" or something like that. Instead, on a disturbingly regular basis we hear people say, "...and then the gentleman shot the innocent bystander in the head...", or in answer to the question "can you identify the rapist?" the answer is often "yes, it's that gentleman over there."
Well, I have news for the rest of the English speaking world. Rapists, murderers and otherwise men who are generally assholes are not gentlemen. I won't say they aren't and never were, because they might have been at one point, but I doubt it. Gentlemen rarely start doing randomly and blatantly ungentlemanly things.

I prefer to think of the gentleman as an extension of the knight of old, who is sworn to valor, whose heart knows only virtue, whsoe blade defends the helpless, whose might upholds the weak, whose word speaks only truth and whose wrath undoes the wicked. Yes, I know, that may be only possible in movies about guys who speak with dragons, but you get the idea.

It's also a shame to me that here in the South, where being a gentleman was also once a mythical kind of thing and something to be proud of, now nationwide instead of the concept of the Southern Gentleman, people are more prone to think of the Southern Redneck - which is more or less the opposite. In the modern South, though, the truth is that the Southern Gentleman has been all but crowded out by Southern Rednecks and Big City Rudeness, often imported from above the Mason-Dixon. Don't get me wrong, I'm not whistling Dixie and waving the Stars and Bars, but it used to mean something to be a Southern Gentleman - who didn't curse or use bad language around women, for example, and who had an idea of the meaning of yet another misused or unused word - honor.

I like how, in yet another movie, Rob Roy tells his sons, "Honor is the gift a man gives himself." Too bad that kids don't grow up learning that kind of lesson, and better yet from a man who lives that way. Okay, one more movie, actually a book - I think we all can agree that the character of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is a perfect depiction of the Southern Gentleman. I know I've thrown out a few movies as examples, and I think it's a shame that there are so few non-fictional representations today that it would take me a while to think of one.

I'd like to think that I could teach my son to grow up to be a Gentleman and to have Honor, but there are so many outside influences anymore, it's tough to teach a kid anything, at least as far as virtues are concerned. And being far from perfect myself.... well.... that just makes it all the more difficult.

I think it would help, though, if people would start thinking about what they're saying and not just randomly throw words around. To do so is to endanger the Gentleman and Honor altogether.