right man
Word Rarity
Common
Frequency: Zipf frequency 5.58 in modern English
14
Scrabble Score
8
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
Used other than figuratively or idiomatically: see right, man.
noun
Alternative form of Right Man.
Example Sentences
- "Never having worked with Sayyidd before, only trusting that his superiors had selected the right man, Bakr was suspicious of Sayyidd's eagerness to abandon all they had worked for up until now."
- "Van Vogt's theory of 'the right man' is one of the most important contributions to the psychology of violence; unfortunately, it was cast in fictional form, and so never achieved the serious attention it deserved."
- "Like Arthur Lingard, the killer in his story, Wilson is himself an example of the cateory he is promoting -- "the right man"."
- "It is a questioning of van Vogt's contention that the "right man" is altogether a bad phenomenon. "The Killer might be regarded as a wilful complication of the problem; an attempt to point out that 'right men' are not necessarily and completely wrong" (p. 11)."
- "Georges Rapin's violent response to Dominique's threat of desertion suggests that he is a classic example of the "right man syndrome"."
- "'[T]he violent man' or the 'Right Man' … is a man driven by a manic need for self-esteem — to feel he is a 'somebody'. He is obsessed by the question of 'losing face', so will never, under any circumstances, admit that he might be in the wrong… Equally interesting is the wild, insane jealousy. Most of us are subject to jealousy, since the notion that someone we care about prefers someone else is an assault on our amour propre. But the Right Man, whose self-esteem is like a constantly festering sore spot, flies into a frenzy at the thought, and becomes capable of murder… The Right Man problem is a problem of highly dominant people. Dominance is a subject of enormous interest to biologists and zoologists because the percentage of dominant animals — or human beings — seems to be amazingly constant. [B]iological studies have confirmed [that] for some odd reason, precisely five per cent — one in twenty — of any animal group are dominant — have leadership qualities…"
Etymology
Originally coined in A.E. Van Vogt's 1954 novel The Violent Man, and subsequently promoted by Colin Wilson.