Blogtrek

The Silliness of Evil

The word "evil" is used more often than it used to be. Evil hijackers, axis of evil, Saddam is evil and so forth. I really don't believe there is such a thing as evil, and I believe that more often or not it means what the "other guys" are. The word has even got a connotation of being comical. There's Evil Kneivel, for instance. "Evil Empire" has a silly sound to it, as in "Press Button to Destroy Evil Empire". Synonyms for "Evil" also sound silly, for example, wicked, sin (as in "sinful chocolate"), and misdeed. By far the silliest is the German word böse . I saw one web site, for example, say "Simpson ist böse". The word sounds funny to me, perhaps because when I learned it, it was in a story about children and their parents. When the parents get angry with their children, the story refers to the parents as "böse". So I came to regard the word as similar to "mad" in English, but the difference is that to say someone is angry, informally, in English you say that they are crazy ("mad"), whereas in German you say that they are evil ("böse"). So I suppose Brits and Americans go crazy when they get angry, and Germans become evil. The whole idea of evil is crazy anyway.