idiosyncratic 復習
テキサス州サンタフェの高校で起きた銃乱射事件について、同州のパトリック副知事は20日、暴力的なテレビゲームや命を軽視する教育などの影響が原因だと述べ、銃の問題ではないとの考えを示しました。
Just two days after a school shooting in Santa Fe, Tex., left 10 dead, the incoming president of the National Rifle Association appeared on television on Sunday to blame mass shootings on a “culture of violence” and the drug Ritalin, adding that “taking away the rights of law-abiding citizens” would not stop the carnage.
“The problem that we’ve got is we’re trying like the dickens to treat the symptom without treating the disease,” the next president, Oliver L. North, said on the program “Fox News Sunday.” “And the disease in this case isn’t the Second Amendment. The disease is youngsters who are steeped in a culture of violence.”
The N.R.A., the country’s most vocal and active proponent of gun rights, has in the past kept a low profile in the wake of mass shootings. After the 2012 school shooting in Newtown, Conn., that left 20 children and six staff members dead, for instance, the organization shut down its Facebook page, stopped updating its Twitter feed and did not return calls from the news media.
But after the mass shooting in February at a high school in Parkland, Fla., the N.R.A. appeared to shift its strategy. Just over a week after that massacre, which killed 17 people, Wayne LaPierre, the N.R.A.’s chief executive, spoke publicly about the shooting and called for more armed guards in schools.
(中略)
Drugs like methylphenidate have a short half-life, meaning they don’t accumulate in a patient’s body. For that reason, patients experiencing an idiosyncratic reaction would have an impulsive outburst, responding to something happening “in the moment,” Dr. Cuffe said, “not something that was planned out over time.”
Dr. R. Scott Benson, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Pensacola, Fla., who has been practicing psychiatry for 40 years, said that about 5 to 7 percent of grade school children are estimated to have A.D.H.D., and hundreds of thousands of children are taking A.D.H.D. medications.
idiosyncratic /ìdiəsɪnkrˈæṭɪk/ に注目しました。『ジーニアス英和辞典第5版』(大修館) によると 「特異な、風変わりな、奇異な」といった意味があります。『ケンブリッジ英英辞典』で定義を確認すると ” strange or unusual habit, way of behaving, or feature that someone or something has“ とあり、並大抵でなく特異な人や物の持つ性質を指していると窺えます。
idiosyncratic は、ギリシャ語で「その人自身」という意味のある ”idio“ と「(複雑に)絡み合った」というニュアンスを含む ”synkrasys” が組合わさりできた語であるとわかりました。つまり、一つの言葉や単純な言葉で表せないほど、その人の性質がいろんな要素が複雑に絡み合っている様を表す語が idiosyncratic になると推察できます。
今週テキサス州で銃による暴力から人々を守るための州法制定に向けて、学生や保護者、教育者を含めた円卓会議が開催されるそうです。(Happidra)
