I Enjoyed the Bit About the Word "Frustration"

Let's go back to the letter to which I linked you yesterday. The gist of it was this: Jenkins made reference in her work to a paper called "What is Romantic Love?" which she cited as his and used as a foil for her own ideas.

She took it from an online forum:

Soble, Alan (unpublished manuscript) What Is Romantic Love? Retrieved from http://forums.catholic.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=9934&d=1300009573 Accessed March 13, 2011.

In time she learned that this paper was not his. It was a paper by some anonymous undergraduate student in philosophy, and the paper itself criticizes Alan Sobel in the third person, so that might have been her first clue. Of course people do sometimes get tricky and criticize themselves in the third person. So it might have been his anyway. But in the world of might-have-beens, she also 'might have' simply checked with the purported author.

Anyway ...

She emailed him an apology, saying "I am so sorry for this. I can only imagine how frustrating and annoying it must be."

He wasn't in a forgiving accept-the-apology-and-move-on mood. He was ticked off and in a teach-a-lesson mood.

So his reply said in part: "I can only imagine how frustrating and annoying it must be." Whence "frustrating"? Annoying, yes, but how have I been frustrated? You throw words around (thoughtlessly dash them off).

Indeed, one is frustrated by failure to achieve a goal. Dictionary definitions refer to unfulfilled needs, unresolved problems, etc. If Soble had been trying to explain himself to the students in his classroom, and Jenkins had been out in the hallway making some distracting noise, she would presumably have been frustrating. But the word doesn't seem to fit here.

Annoying plainly does. One out of two then?

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