The dog scares the cat with its threatening attitude
The dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy ( RAE ) recognizes three meanings of the verb arredrar , which can also be used as a pronominal . The first meaning refers to separating, isolating or distancing .
scare someone
Deterrence can also refer to intimidate, intimidate, or make one retreat due to a threat . For example: “No danger was going to deter us, so we kept going despite the setbacks and difficulties,” “The firefighters did not let themselves be deterred by the fire and, without hesitation, they entered the house that was on fire to rescue its occupants” , “Malicious comments are not going to deter me, so I am willing to continue with my task regardless of what others say” .
Take the case of Charlie Hebdo magazine , which suffered a terrible terrorist attack in early 2015 . With the premise of avenging the honor of the Prophet Muhammad , supposedly tarnished by the satires published by the weekly, two members of Al Qaeda entered the editorial office and murdered twelve people, including the director of Charlie Hebdo . Despite the massacre, the survivors did not let themselves be deterred by the fundamentalists and continued to carry out their work. In fact, a week after the attack, issue 1178 of the magazine was published, which broke the sales record.
Suppose, on the other hand, that a man asks his employer to pay him the money owed , since he has not received his salary for three months. Faced with this demand, the owner of the company threatens to fire him. Intimidation fails to deter the worker , who decides to go ahead with his claim and defend his rights .
A multifaceted verb
As we can see in all the examples just presented, this verb refers not to a single well-defined action, but generally to an attitude accompanied by several actions that seek to sow fear in the other so that they give in to a certain blackmail or stop pursuing your own goals. In the case of fire, on the other hand, it is not a person but a natural disaster that could frighten firefighters to the point of paralyzing them and preventing them from doing their job.
There are many reasons why we may feel this fear of moving forward. In some cases it is not a confrontation between a single person and his victim, nor something occasional, but it can be impregnated in a culture ; For example: machismo has existed since time immemorial and has tried to intimidate women and homosexuals, both through direct and indirect actions, since their birth.
In some cases, bullying someone leads to emotionally canceling them out.
In everyday speech
Although many people know this and other terms, such as its synonym intimidate , they do not use it frequently in everyday speech. This phenomenon of reserving certain words for the written language does not respond to an unbreakable cause: nature does not deprive us of using them in an informal conversation, it is not an impediment of our body, although it does influence the speed at which our brain can access the vocabulary and grammatical rules.
For this and other reasons, societies become accustomed to using different language when speaking and writing. In the first case, the vocabulary is considerably smaller, which leads to the inevitable repetition of words very frequently, and the grammatical level tends to be low. While in a novel or a newspaper article we expect the use of tenses to be correct, the same is not true in a conversation with friends. With respect to scare , we could use one or more words that denote an equivalent idea, such as "scare" or "get him to stop trying."