Do I have enough confidence in my ability to rate how confident other people are?
Confidence is another one of those slippery words as a noun. The adjective appearing to relate to it, as used in our prompt, appears less slippery but isn’t. When we name a person confident we usually mean, so much so that it is not said, that ‘they are confident in themselves’. That very much appears to be the lesson from the Etymonline.com entry on the adjective:
confident (adj.): 1570s, “self-reliant, sure of oneself;” c. 1600, “fully assured, having strong belief,” from French confident, from Latin confidentem (nominative confidens) “firmly trusting, reliant, self-confident, bold, daring,” present participle of confidere “to have full trust or reliance,” from assimilated form of com, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + fidere “to trust” (from PIE root *bheidh- “to trust, confide, persuade”).
That we usually mean ‘having full trust or reliance’ in themselves though is only part of the story, for there is often a context in which we interpret the specific functions of selves in which we are confident in someone and they are confident in themselves, such as an ability to perform a certain job role. Sometimes, more rarely, we mean that we are confident that a person, ourselves or another self, has a general competence in each and every domain, but its rarity is self explanatory, except when it is used as a boast about oneself or a means of raising the self-belief of another without the need of pro ing that prompt to their capacity.
In fact, on the whole, I think we use the word as a descriptive absolute meaning confident in every skill and the grasp of knowledge rather ironically. When we say ‘Tom is very confident he can do everything required’, it is likely that our tone of speech will express as much doubt of that proposition as belief in it. In brief, we aren’t always confident that our Tom has a true assement of how confident he is, a doubt in us that suggests very few people have absolute trust in professions of being confident, even when we say it of ourself. We might be happier to speak without nuanced tone if we were to speak of Tom’s confidence in being capable of a good job on our plumbing when we know from the evidence of qualifications and historical experience that Tom’s abilities are already well attested.
Maybe we need to evoke the noun ‘confidence’ to take this further. I feel this because the word has a much fuller ety.ological history in Etymonline.com, which says:
confidence (n.): c. 1400, “assurance or belief in the good will, veracity, etc. of another,” from Old French confidence or directly from Latin confidentia, from confidentem (nominative confidens) “firmly trusting, bold,” present participle of confidere “to have full trust or reliance,” from assimilated form of com, here perhaps an intensive prefix (see com-), + fidere “to trust” (from PIE root *bheidh- “to trust, confide, persuade”). / From mid-15c. as “reliance on one’s own powers, resources, or circumstances, self-assurance.” The meaning “certainty of a proposition or assertion, sureness with regard to a fact” is from 1550s. The meaning “a secret, a private communication” is from 1590s. / The connection with swindling (compare con (adj.)) dates to mid-19c. from the notion of the false “trustworthiness” which is the key to the game.
I find it interesting that the history of adjective ‘confident’ rather sticks with the meanings of the noun, according to this source (but are we totally confident in it?) in its adoption into English in the fifteenth century AD (1400s). These meanings seem to assume subsequent prepositions or prepositional clauses (notably ‘in’ a quality ‘of’ another person).
It seems that only a century later is it used with the assumption of meaning generalised self-confidence, without the need to use the term ‘self’ to indicate our confidence is reflexive. And it takes until the nineteenth century for ‘confidence’ to relate to false confidence, an appearance of belief or trust in someone or something that does not merit it and is created for the purposes of fraud or mischief (like Melville’s The Confidence Man).
But there is anyway, isn’t there (if you accept my reflections on usage above) always a doubt that can be expressed at the same time as an expression of trust and belief that we call confidence. Isn’t every expression of confidence in another or oneself, or of being confident possibly delusional or based on evidence that does not fully support our trust and belief.
And anyway weren’t ‘confidence men’ what poets were in Dante and Milton, such that the latter invented the type of the confidence man in his Satan. So much was this a problem that in the nineteenth century William Blake believed that the only root of confident truth was in Satan, a self-confident creator of confidences in a world of uncertainty, the only world, in truth, we can ever claim to confidently know. What a conundrum.
If I nominate the most confident person I know wouldn’t I really be expressing my doubts in them, yet to be proven. Or doubt in my own judgement!
Bye for now
Love Steven xxxxxxx
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