The Dignity of Restraint
September, 2001
It’s always interesting to notice which words disappear from common usage. We have them in our passive vocabulary, we know their meaning, but they tend to disappear from day-to-day conversation — which usually means that they’ve disappeared from the way we shape our lives. Several years back I gave a Dhamma talk in which I happened to mention the word “dignity.” After the talk, a woman in the audience who had emigrated from Russia came to me and said that she had never heard Americans use the word “dignity” before. She had learned it when she studied English over in Russia, but she never heard people use it here. And it’s good to think about why. Where and why did it disappear?