Deserve’s Got Everything to Do With It

Injustice and entitlement might seem like two completely different, unrelated feelings.

Injustice is when you have an expectation for the rules of the game, but things turn out differently. Entitlement, by contrast, means you expect to be treated a certain way, regardless of how you’ve been playing the game.

In some ways, they really are opposites. Entitled people tend to expect to win this game every time. Everything is baked into the way things should go: their way. People fighting injustice, like the Spiderman or Superman, are more concerned with making sure the game is played according to the rules.

However, there is one thing that really ties them together. This aspect is a necessary but not sufficient condition for feelings of either entitlement or injustice to appear. It’s a feeling that you deserve something.

Contrary to Clint Eastwood’s incredible line from Unforgiven, deserve has an awful lot to do with it.

The word deserve comes from Latin deservire.

That prefix—the de- at the start of the word—signifies that whatever follows is done completely or thoroughly. What follows is the word servire, which means to serve. Put these two parts together and you end up with a word that meant to serve well.

During the days of the Roman republic and empire, the meaning persisted. Deservire implied a transaction of some sort: one person was serving another well, in exchange for something else. In other words, it’s not like they would get paid regardless of how they performed the service. They didn’t automatically deserve it.

Latin gradually became vulgar Latin, and that became Old French. By that time, deservir meant something more like the modern way we think of deserve, and that steadily became the dominant use as Old French became… well, French.

Today, we are cleanly in this camp when we use the word deserve in English.

The Eastwood quote I mentioned has stuck with me for nearly thirty years now. The first time I heard it, my friend Nate shared the movie with me over at his place. I’ll never forget sipping bourbon as we watched everyone else drink bourbon on the screen, and we made something of a ritual of it by drinking whenever one of the main characters took a sip.

In a dramatic scene near the end of the film, William Munny (Eastwood’s character) is about to kill someone, who protests that they don’t deserve to be killed. The chilling line his character delivers has stuck in my mind ever since:

Deserve’s got nothin’ to do with it.

It’s an incredible line, but in this case, deserve really has everything to do with it. It just manifests in a few different ways.