Envy or Jealousy? from James W. Ziskin

Do you ever lose hope of success, critical or financial? Do you ever feel a twinge of envy or jealousy for what other writers have achieved. Let’s be brutally honest.

 

Brutally honest, eh? All right, here goes.

 

Yes, I lose hope of success on a regular basis. It doesn’t last for long, but it’s a constant questioning of my own talent, commitment, and choices—choices of subject, narrator, body count, font size, lunch, you name it… Like my colleagues at Criminal Minds, I’ve enjoyed some critical success, though it hasn’t all been slaps on the back and choruses of for he’s a jolly good fellow. I’ve had my share of mean-spirited reviews and critiques. Don’t worry, I take names.

 

Financial success is another matter. Let me put it this way: I often brag that I “sell TENS of books.” One day I’d love to make The New York Times Best Sellers List. Till then, I’m boycotting the list and refuse to have my books appear there.

 

Envy and Jealousy

Am I jealous when my friends have good health news? Or a new love in their lives? Of course not. I’m thrilled for them. And the same is true when friends achieve wild success with their writing careers. Some win prestigious awards or hit the best sellers list or sign a TV deal. But while I’m not jealous of them, I might feel a twinge of envy. In modern English, I feel that “envy” does not necessarily carry the connotation of resentment. It’s merely a desire for something someone else has. Depriving the someone who has the something you desire to have is not what envy is about. There’s only the wish to experience the having of the something had by the someone who has it. Is that clear? There’ll be a quiz at the end of this post.

Today, jealousy carries a different connotation, at least to my mind. It involves a feeling of entitlement by the person who has not for the something had by the someone else who has, as in when a person is jealous of another’s good fortune, that person feels more deserving of the someone else who is enjoying it (the good fortune). Or, in another example, one can’t (in my prescriptive world) be jealous of other people inheriting their own families’ money and property since one does not have any claim to it. One can be envious, but not jealous.

Let the arguing begin!

According to dictionary.com: 

Envy and jealousy are very close in meaning. Envy denotes a longing to possess something awarded to or achieved by another: to feel envy when a friend inherits a fortune.
Jealousy, on the other hand, denotes a feeling of resentment that another has gained something that one more rightfully deserves: to feel jealousy when a coworker receives a promotion. Jealousy also refers to anguish caused by fear of unfaithfulness.

—Dictionary.com

So, closing the parentheses, I aver that I am not “jealous” of the success—either financial or critical—of other writers, but I can, at times, be green with envy. Notice I’ve just used “green” with “envy,” when Shakespeare famously associated “green” with “jealousy” not “envy.”

“O beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.”

—Othello, Act III, scene 2

Let the arguing resume!

“Green with envy” and “green with jealousy” coexist because envy and jealousy are so close in meaning, even if I argued above that they are distinct. And even if you’re ready to argue with me over this post…

Here are the Google NGram Viewer results for “green with envy” and “green with jealousy.” (You should be using https://books.google.com/ngrams/ , by the way, especially if you write historical novels.) They’re pretty close in the number of citations, at least since the mid 1800s, when they appear for the first time in that form.

 

Make of that what you will, but I maintain that today there are subtle differences in their meanings, though both involve coveting that which others have.

I close with my wish that all writers achieve the success they envy in other writers, and/or of which they are jealous (of ?) in those other writers who they feel are less deserving of said success than they—the first group of writers I mentioned, not the undeserving hacks of whom they, the first group, are jealous of—are.