Auto-da-fé

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Literally «an act of faith» but in usage its meaning is exclusively a sinister act performed in the name of a greater good. May refer specifically to the torture and burnings of the Spanish Inquisition.

I wrote this down a while back but I’m pret­ty sure that I found it in de Toc­queville’s Democ­ra­cy in Amer­i­ca.

This takes the prize for most loaded phrase. Many phras­es are used almost exclusve­ly in the iron­ic sense, but few have made it into the dic­tio­nary (Cham­bers’ and Oxford Amer­i­can were the ones I checked) with so specif­i­cal­ly a neg­a­tive con­no­ta­tion when the lit­er­al mean­ing is at worst neu­tral and at best vir­tu­ous. The Con­sti­tu­tion has the full faith and cred­it clause, peo­ple are asked to take infor­ma­tion on faith and coura­geous acts have been described as acts of faith, but an Eng­lish speak­er using auto-da-fé is cer­tain­ly speak­ing of evil done in the name of good, and most like­ly refer­ring to the Inquisition. 

Published by splicer

One Reply to “Auto-da-fé”

  1. THE faith

    Auto-da-fe is Por­tuguese for “act of THE faith,” mean­ing specif­i­cal­ly the Catholic faith. The def­i­n­i­tion in my dic­tio­nary is “the exe­cu­tion of a heretic.”  That is a lit­tle dif­fer­ent from “act of faith” which means “an action moti­vat­ed by belief in some­thing for which there is no con­crete evidence.”

    Dad