{"id":4596,"date":"2019-11-12T23:45:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-12T23:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=4596"},"modified":"2019-11-13T04:46:02","modified_gmt":"2019-11-13T04:46:02","slug":"word-of-the-day-protean","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2019\/11\/12\/word-of-the-day-protean\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day: Protean"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The adjective <em>protean<\/em>\n(pronounced <strong>pro<\/strong>-ti-\u01ddn)\nmeans \u201creadily assuming different forms or characters; extremely variable,\u201d or \u201cchangeable\nin shape or form, as an amoeba,\u201d according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dictionary.com\">www.dictionary.com<\/a>. It can also mean \u201cversatile\u201d\nwhen applied to an actor, or it can mean \u201crelated to Proteus.\u201d That last definition\nmakes a lot of sense because the word comes from the name of the Greek god\nProteus. Proteus was possibly, in Green myth, the oldest son of Poseidon, the\ngod of the sea. Proteus was a god of the sea or of other bodies of waters, like\nrivers. According to Brittanica.com, \u201cProteus knew all things\u2014past, present,\nand future\u2014but disliked divulging what he knew. Those who wished to consult him\nhad first to surprise and bind him during his noonday slumber. Even when caught\nhe would try to escape by assuming all sorts of shapes. But if his captor held\nhim fast, the god at last returned to his proper shape, gave the wished-for\nanswer, and plunged into the sea.\u201d So this shape-shifting god gives us the\nadjective, which comes into the language in the 1590s, according to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.etymonline.com\">www.etymonline.com<\/a>. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Protean sounds like it could be a good thing, and when we\nuse it in the third sense, about an actor, it is a good thing. I can think of a\nnumber of protean actors\u2014Lawrence Olivier, Meryl Streep, Ian McKellan, Derek\nJacobi, and others\u2014as well as actors who are not versatile\u2014John Wayne, Clint\nEastwood, Tom Cruise, and other actors who pretty much play themselves in\neverything they do.&nbsp; And the second sense\nprobably isn\u2019t a bad thing when used about an amoeba. But I\u2019m not sure calling a\nperson protean because he or she is \u201cextremely variable\u201d is a compliment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One example of a protean character, whose birthday comes up\nlater this month, is Theodore Robert Cowell. He was a handsome man, very\npersuasive, very amiable. As a young man he worked for the Rockefeller campaign\nin 1968, even attending the Republican National Convention in Miami Beach\n(Nixon won the nomination). He attended several different colleges, and even\nbegan law school, though he never finished. He dated a woman in college, but\nshe broke up with him because she thought he was immature and lacked ambition.\nBut several years later, he reconnected with her, courted her again, and even\ntalked marriage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He talked about marriage until one day he just cut off all\ncontact with her, that is. Apparently, he set up the whole romance just so that\nhe could dump her, probably in retaliation for her dumping her several years\nearlier. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">He would approach young women in public places, feigning and\ninjury or a need, and convince them that he needed their help. In one instance,\nhe wore a sling on his arm while at a state park, and asked attractive young\nwomen to help him unload a sailboat from his 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. While\nseveral of them refused him, one said yes. Another young woman at the park left\nher group to find a restroom. Neither of those women survived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">You see, this very nice, handsome, and amiable young man\nwent by a different name, Ted Bundy. He killed women. He killed a lot of women.\nHe confessed to 30 or so murders, and may have committed many more. He may even\nhave started his killing as a 14-year-old boy, though he denied killing\n8-year-old Ann Marie Burr of Tacoma, WA. He was also very smart, even so far as\ndefending himself in his various trials. He was also a control freak, which is\nalso why he defended himself in his various trials. And he was so attractive\nthat he even married a young divorcee, Carole Ann Boone, and they had a child\ntogether, though they did divorce three years before his execution in 1989.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">It is surprising and even shocking that people could have\nbeen fooled by &#8220;the most cold-hearted son of a ***** you&#8217;ll ever meet,\u201d as\nhe described himself. Yet they were because of he was protean, a shape shifter.\nAnd he\u2019s not the only one. Many people can appear to be different things to\ndifferent people, performing as this or that in order to fool others into\ntrusting them. And not all of these protean people are serial killers. Many of\nthem are politicians, salesmen, and even college administrators. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">And many of these protean people never get caught, the way\nTed Bundy was caught. When you try to pin them down, they shape shift and slip\naway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The adjective protean (pronounced pro-ti-\u01ddn) means \u201creadily assuming different forms or characters; extremely variable,\u201d or \u201cchangeable in shape or form, as an amoeba,\u201d according to www.dictionary.com. It can also mean [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4597,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4596","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4596","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4596"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4596\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4598,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4596\/revisions\/4598"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4597"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4596"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4596"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4596"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}