What does “to inhabit a different person’s skin” mean?
In the New Yorker’s January 23rd Issue that came under the title, “Parting words.” “The
key word of the speech was “citizen,” which Obama called “the most important office in a democracy,” one that Obama will embrace in his post-Presidency. His exhortations and implications of blame were nonpartisan: conservatives might have heard their denial of science called out, while liberals might have been stung by the allusion to fair-weather activism. In the film, White and Non-White were urged to imagine inhabiting a different person’s skin. I
know the expression, “comfortable in one’s own skin,” but I don’t know the idiom, “inhabit different person’s skin”. However, some people say that, “they will be accustomed to having their own skin, whether they like it or not” A
different person’s skin is felt like to live in clothes like a woman underwear. What does “inhabit a different person’s skin” mean? Is this a popular turn of phrase?
What is the best way to describe life as a child?
The Common Form of the idiom in the United States (to judge from Google Books search results) is “inhabit someone else’s skin. Is it a bad phrase in “Elementary English, volume 50, issue 1 (1973)”?
He’s in need of help. Life makes him bitter, happy, cynical, hopeful, believing, skeptical, amused, and angry. He have sympathy, and that special kind of sympathy we call empathy. How can you imagine the skin, if you inhabit someone else’s? He wonders what if and he cares.
The New York T, volume 1 (1970): “When I entered the theater it was in order
to understand myself more profoundly. When I inhabit someone else’s skin, it enables me to discover my own secrets—and this is the great point of departure in the theater. What makes us actors? Now, yes, I can take up acting and act but I can’t seem to get home from acting or acting completely. One chooses the dream because it is not real or one chooses the dream because it is more than real. How do actors embrace the theater in order to run from life? As
both of these instances suggest the sense of the expression is to imagine oneself so well in the place of someone else that one feels that other person’s unhappiness, happiness, and day-to-day concerns so thoroughly that one’s focus and reference points align with the other person’s temporarily. This is essentially the second meaning of empathy as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003):
empathy n 1850 1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2 : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit
Any skin (that is, any other person) is different enough from our own that imagining inhabiting it is a challenge to one’s comprehension, awareness, and sympathy for others.
The Common Form of the idiom in the United States (to judge from Google Books search results) is “inhabit someone else’s skin. Is it a bad phrase in “Elementary English, volume 50, issue 1 (1973)”?
He’s in need of help. Life makes him bitter, happy, cynical, hopeful, believing, skeptical, amused, and angry. He have sympathy, and that special kind of sympathy we call empathy. How can you imagine the skin, if you inhabit someone else’s? He wonders what if and he cares.
The New York T, volume 1 (1970): “When I entered the theater it was in order
to understand myself more profoundly. When I inhabit someone else’s skin, it enables me to discover my own secrets—and this is the great point of departure in the theater. What makes us actors? Now, yes, I can take up acting and act but I can’t seem to get home from acting or acting completely. One chooses the dream because it is not real or one chooses the dream because it is more than real. How do actors embrace the theater in order to run from life? As
both of these instances suggest the sense of the expression is to imagine oneself so well in the place of someone else that one feels that other person’s unhappiness, happiness, and day-to-day concerns so thoroughly that one’s focus and reference points align with the other person’s temporarily. This is essentially the second meaning of empathy as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003):
empathy n 1850 1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2 : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit
Any skin (that is, any other person) is different enough from our own that imagining inhabiting it is a challenge to one’s comprehension, awareness, and sympathy for others.
The Common Form of the idiom in the United States (to judge from Google Books search results) is “inhabit someone else’s skin. Is it a bad phrase in “Elementary English, volume 50, issue 1 (1973)”?
He’s in need of help. Life makes him bitter, happy, cynical, hopeful, believing, skeptical, amused, and angry. He have sympathy, and that special kind of sympathy we call empathy. How can you imagine the skin, if you inhabit someone else’s? He wonders what if and he cares.
The New York T, volume 1 (1970): “When I entered the theater it was in order
to understand myself more profoundly. When I inhabit someone else’s skin, it enables me to discover my own secrets—and this is the great point of departure in the theater. What makes us actors? Now, yes, I can take up acting and act but I can’t seem to get home from acting or acting completely. One chooses the dream because it is not real or one chooses the dream because it is more than real. How do actors embrace the theater in order to run from life? As
both of these instances suggest the sense of the expression is to imagine oneself so well in the place of someone else that one feels that other person’s unhappiness, happiness, and day-to-day concerns so thoroughly that one’s focus and reference points align with the other person’s temporarily. This is essentially the second meaning of empathy as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003):
empathy n 1850 1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2 : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit
Any skin (that is, any other person) is different enough from our own that imagining inhabiting it is a challenge to one’s comprehension, awareness, and sympathy for others.
The Common Form of the idiom in the United States (to judge from Google Books search results) is “inhabit someone else’s skin. Is it a bad phrase in “Elementary English, volume 50, issue 1 (1973)”?
He’s in need of help. Life makes him bitter, happy, cynical, hopeful, believing, skeptical, amused, and angry. He have sympathy, and that special kind of sympathy we call empathy. How can you imagine the skin, if you inhabit someone else’s? He wonders what if and he cares.
The New York T, volume 1 (1970): “When I entered the theater it was in order
to understand myself more profoundly. When I inhabit someone else’s skin, it enables me to discover my own secrets—and this is the great point of departure in the theater. What makes us actors? Now, yes, I can take up acting and act but I can’t seem to get home from acting or acting completely. One chooses the dream because it is not real or one chooses the dream because it is more than real. How do actors embrace the theater in order to run from life? As
both of these instances suggest the sense of the expression is to imagine oneself so well in the place of someone else that one feels that other person’s unhappiness, happiness, and day-to-day concerns so thoroughly that one’s focus and reference points align with the other person’s temporarily. This is essentially the second meaning of empathy as defined by Merriam-Webster’s Eleventh Collegiate Dictionary (2003):
empathy n 1850 1 : the imaginative projection of a subjective state into an object so that the object appears to be infused with it 2 : the action of understanding, being aware of, being sensitive to, and vicariously experiencing the feelings, thoughts, and experience of another of either the past or present without having the feelings, thoughts, and experience fully communicated in an objectively explicit
Any skin (that is, any other person) is different enough from our own that imagining inhabiting it is a challenge to one’s comprehension, awareness, and sympathy for others.
