tardy |ˈtärdē|
adjective
delaying or delayed beyond the right or expected time; late: please forgive this tardy reply.
from Latin tardus “slow, sluggish; late; dull, stupid,”
This post, by definition, is tardy. The prompt came out on January 23, and it’s now February 19, so I have a lot of catching up to do. To my now staggering count of 16 followers, you have my most sincere apologies.
Whenever I hear “tardy”, I associate it with being late to class. Now, one might think that being tardy is not such a big deal, because based on its denotation, being tardy is just being delayed. But this definition lacks subtext.
Being late implies that you believe your time is more important than whoever else you’re making wait. Maybe you don’t think this way explicitly, but that’s essentially what your actions convey. Of course, there are plenty of excuses you can make like traffic, bathroom stops and missing alarms, but these are all paltry at best. The reason being that if you really cared, if you really valued the time of that person you’re going to be meeting with, you’d take all of these variables into account and arrive on time regardless. In fact, I’d even say that you should plan to arrive early all the time, so that if there’s really an emergency delay in your travel plans, you’ll still arrive on time.
I kind of like the Latin “tardus” meaning because of this. Tardus doesn’t only refer to being delayed, it’s literal definition of sluggish, dull and stupid fit the feelings and characteristics that I think “tardy” invokes.
This is not to say that I’m never tardy. Far from it, I’m late to stuff a lot. I’ll admit to my faults, however, which is more than can be said for some. I genuinely feel bad when I arrive late to meeting with real friends, because I know I’ve prioritized my time over theirs, which is selfish, sluggish and stupid. But I’m trying to get better.
I think it’s important to add the feelings a word invokes, the connotation of a word to make it more clear that there’s a problem to begin with. If everyone immediately associated being tardy with being sluggish and uncaring, I think we’d more quickly move to make a change.
Next time you’re late, ask yourself this: is there any reason other than your own laziness that made you tardy?
If there are none, are you happy knowing that your friends think you don’t care enough about them to be on time?
Ex nihilo writing 