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Boon's distinction between 'scared' and 'afraid'


Does Boon's line about being "scared" and "afraid" seem backwards to you? Before the horse race, Boon tells Lucius, "You can be sacred if you want - you can't help that - but don't be afraid, son," raising the question between the two. The more I thought about the line, the more I disagreed with Boon. While someone can scare you (transitive), being afraid is a state of being (intransitive). Fear can be respectful.

I re-read the original passage about the horse race in Faulkner's book, but didn't see Boon's line in the dialog. Did anyone else have have an argument for scared being a better state than afraid?

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I think what he meant was something along the line of "being scared is about having adrenaline in your blood.. you're on edge. You can use that to drive you. But being afraid plants your feet down into the ground and keeps you from taking a chance."

One can still fight back if they're scared.

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Yeah, I think that it's something along the lines of FDR's famous inaugural quotation, "The only fear we have is fear itself." If you think about it too long, the syntax doesn't necessarily make that much sense, but the point is the sensibility, the instant spirit of not being frozen by fear. In Boon's quotation, something similar is at play.

Ultimately, the matter comes down to differences in connotation more than denotation (one might see the work of French philosopher-critics Remy de Gourmont and Roland Barthes). The connotation of 'scared' is something more immediate and ephemeral, whereas being 'afraid' suggests a deeper and perhaps impermeable mental condition. The denotative differences may be insignificant or nonexistent, but the connotative differences are clear enough to instinctively grasp, however briefly. Again, if you think about it too deeply, then it stops working.

... nice to see a thoughtful discussion, though. I guess that you have to be on a board such as this one (a small film from over forty years ago like The Reivers) to really escape the trolling and nonsense.

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