An officer is someone who has completed training to join a security force.
Official is a term with various uses and applications. As an adjective, official - which comes from the Latin officiālis - is that which is official , that is, that has authenticity and that emanates from an authority . For example: “The official unemployment rate has reached 9.1% in the third quarter” , “My mother gave me the official Chicago Bulls t-shirt” , “The official premiere of the film will take place on November 26” .
When the adjective is used to refer to an institution or building , it indicates that it is paid for with public funds and that it depends on the State : “I would like to enter the Official Language School.”
Officer in the armed and security forces
In the field of a nation 's armed forces and security forces, officer is a rank that is acquired upon completion of training. Officers can be differentiated according to the place they occupy in the hierarchical scale of the institution.
An officer is generally responsible for giving orders, guiding and instructing non-commissioned officers or other members lower in the hierarchy . In everyday language, however, the term is usually used to refer to any uniformed person who belongs to a security force: “Officer, I need your help: my wallet has just been stolen,” “The boy, apparently, was planning to steal "That car, but when the police officer approached he decided to leave," "The police do what they can to fight crime, but they need more officers."
Another use of the word official is linked to the minister who carries out death sentences . In this case, officer is synonymous with executioner : “The capital punishment was carried out by the officer at 5 PM.”
Something official is authentic or legitimate.
An authentic product
In the field of the entertainment industry, on the other hand, this term is used as an adjective to reflect the authenticity of a product . For example, children's movies are often released accompanied by stuffed animals, toys, board games and video games, among other products; But only those approved and supervised by the original company are considered official, and this usually guarantees consumers the highest possible quality, as well as the resemblance to the characters and settings of the story.
While official products reflect the original content most accurately, they also tend to be the most expensive. It is for this reason that there are others, manufactured without the quality seal of the producer, but at much more accessible prices. Far from being a piracy tactic, these are also legal ; Its purpose is to sell to all those consumers whose budgets are too tight to access the official ones.
About the use of the official term
Given that the word has a wide range of applications, ranging from popular language to the legal field, we can see it in examples such as those just presented, which have little relationship between them. The meaning may be practically the same in some cases, but the degree of importance differs : if a percentage of unemployment is not the true one, that is, if it had been manipulated to deceive the population, it would be a much more serious problem than the falsification of a basketball jersey or a confusion regarding the release date of a movie.
In this framework, one can also speak of unofficial , which is precisely the opposite: something "unofficial" or unofficial. For example, if a journalist is in the middle of an investigation that aims to expose the corruption of a certain political group, before concluding his work and having verified data, he can talk about unofficial information to refer to everything he senses or deduce based on what you have gathered up to that point.