Tiger's Transgressions

Well, another high profile celebrity has created a highly public scandal. And the news media, and the public it seems, are loving it. People like to write about it. People like to read about it. It seems that it makes us feel better in a sick kind of way when someone really successful fails. It’s kind of like a contest to see how pathetic we can be.

Tiger’s personal problems are not something that I wish to write about myself. It feels a little bit funny feeling sorry for a star billionaire athlete, but I do. Like the rest of us, he is his own worst enemy for sure. I doubt that it will hurt him a whole lot in the pocket book personally, or on the golf course either, but it doesn’t sound like it is going to be too much fun being Tiger at home these days. And I’m quite certain we’ll be hearing about it for a while as the lurid details, like crumbs, are devoured by a waiting public.

But something that I did find quite interesting was this - When Tiger finally realized that he needed to face the music (the Press), he apologized for his transgressions. The next day, on Canada AM, one of the co-hosts of the show (Bev Thomson) responded to Tiger’s ‘confession’ by drawing attention to his use of the word ‘transgression’. She said something like… “That will probably be the most googled word today because who knows what it means? What is a transgression?”

In my mind I could immediately picture all these people rushing to their google search engine to try and find out what a transgression was. And I thought, have we really reached the point where as a society we don’t even know what the word ‘transgression’ means? It just struck me as odd.

I know that it’s just a word and that words come and go, and new words and new usages develop as well, but I just can’t help but wonder - Are we only losing a word, or are we seeing the loss of the whole concept of moral boundaries out of our language. And how close is the connection between our common language and our social conscience?

And I know that it is nothing new to point out the moral slide that has been taking place in our society but it just kind of struck me when I heard a very intelligent and competent national news show host say, “What’s a transgression?”